Journalism, a Disgrace

Journalism is corrupt. It is not getting there. It is there. It has been there more than 100 years. But it now is worse and more immoral than ever.

It swoons. It slobbers. It exaggerates. It evades. It lies. It embellishes. It omits. It enables. It amplifies biases.

It informs. It educates. It amuses. It entertains. It investigates.

But, it is not deteriorating. It already has deteriorated. And because of the many, many media outlets spewing the filth, it is, more than ever, clearly corrupt and in need of a super transplant.

This is no cheap shot: it is liberalism. It masks itself in biased news.

Liberals cannot stand to hear themselves criticized. Until liberals realize what has happened, and what they have done to this society through journalism, deterioration will continue, although already it doesn’t have far to go to reach the dungeon.

Perhaps the easy targets are the liberals in the classrooms. The problem did not start in the classrooms, but it explodes there.

Liberals in the classrooms at all levels of education (elementary school through graduate school, both teachers and students) have perpetuated the distortions first offered through various forms of journalism.

The non-liberals of this society are left with hoping liberals someday will see the light. Some think this never will happen. This is not because liberals outnumber non-liberals . . . because they don’t. But liberals are not charitable. They will not give up their reign easily.

Bringing the issue to light is one task. Working on it looms as a far greater problem.

Corrupt journalism knifes into fairness. It knifes into objectivity. It knifes into the truth. It knifes into everyday life.

It is a national disgrace. It is ripping away at our society. It is ripping away at our republic. It is tearing apart our democracy.

And this is laughed at by the controlling (or “mainstream”) media.

Reform is necessary and urgent.

Conservatives cannot lead the changes that are necessary, at least not alone. It will take journalism professors who admit the fact of the national scandal.

While journalists the world over wring their hands over the future of newspapers, for example, the underlying issue is largely ignored. Many of those newspapers have been publishing political garbage masquerading as journalism.

Dean Walter Williams, University of Missouri School of Journalism’s first Dean, a century ago wrote the Journalist’s Creed that says in part: the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its PUBLIC SERVICE.

We must reevaluate: just what is that public service? The school’s own professors need to reevaluate.

Many books have been written on the subject of corrupt, biased journalism. Most of these have been dead-on, but often ignored by powerful people in journalism.

It is time for journalism schools to admit these tomes into the curriculum. It is important that journalism schools return to teaching objectivity and exposing biased reporting. Journalism schools must start teaching students who are NOT out to change the world, but are interested in a good story and, and this may be hard for you, the truth.

Journalism professors know about this. Most are on the liberal side.

In Philadelphia, both the Inquirer and the Daily News are liberal organs. Nearly all of their local columnists are liberal. The national columnists the two papers use are overwhelmingly liberal. This nation is NOT overwhelmingly liberal. These papers, just as all the others, need to balance their opinion columns. And they need to get opinions out of their news columns.

When Congress Sunday (March 21st, 2010) passed the health care bill, the so-called “mainstream” media explained little about the many negatives in the legislation. There was no examination of the huge cost to the taxpayers of the nation.

The Philadelphia Daily News sometimes uses its “cover” page for a biased headline, an editorial of sorts. Take, for example, the day after the passage of the health care bill. Said the Daily News on its cover: “Health-care reform: PASSED AT LAST!”

The Journalist’s Creed says in part: “I believe that clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness are fundamental to good journalism.”

That Daily News headline did not suggest fairness. Nor was it accurate; it was an opinion. Nor was it a clear statement … because health-care reform, in the fashion it cleared Congress Sunday, is opposed by a majority of Americans.

If newspapers (and other liberal media) are to regain their standing as organs of GOOD JOURNALISM, they must return to good old investigative journalism.

Dig. Dig into illegal immigration, which poises to be the Obama administration’s next cause.

Dig into the TARP bill and how its money is being spent.

Dig into the czars. Do you know about them? Do you know who they are, and how they got their jobs?

Dig into cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over, although Senator John Kerry recently said it is the next cause. So, which is next, immigration or cap and trade.

Dig into the related crisis: increasing governmental controls on our lives.

Dig into what President Obama has in mind for his “redistribution of wealth”.

Dig into the corporate bailouts. It is bizarre to even think that two major auto manufacturers are now controlled both by Obama and the auto workers union.

Expain to the American public just how much the nation is in debt. Do not blame it on the Republicans under President Bush, although that was part of it. The problem has been mushrooming because Congress is totally out of control. The nation’s media are assumed to be the watchdog of the Congress, but I submit to you that most reporters are going to more cocktail parties in Washington than they are devoting themselves to investigative reporting.

On this blog at some point in the near future, I hope, I am going to talk at greater length about the INSANITY now going at full speed in Washington, DC. As an example, earlier this year, President Obama submitted to Congress a huge, huge, huge $3.8 trillion national budget. Not long after that, somebody phoned into Rush Limbaugh’s show to try to put the national budget in perspective.

He pointed out that George Clooney’s Haitian telethon raised $66 million. That’s alot of money. The caller said George Clooney would have to have a $66 million telethon EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT 158 YEARS to match Obama’s spending in the 2010 budget.

In fact, as of March, 2011, with the national debt at $14 trillion, that situation is dramatically more graphic. To raise the $14 trillion, the ever-rising total of the national debt at the rate of $66 million each day, it would take 581 years!!!

Scary beyond words is the fact that this nation has increased the national debt by one-third in just the last three years. Do you understand that? Three years ago, the national debt had been increased to a level of near $10 trillion in the first 200+ years of the nation. Then, another third of that already huge, huge amount was heaped onto the pile in the past three years! Do you understand that this is ridiculous?

Hey, you reporters: investigate the money situation in Washington. See what we are doing to this nation. See what we are doing to our grandchildren.

It is a disgrace.

A year ago, in mid-April, 2009, I attended the Centennial of Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalism fraternity, at Depauw University in Indiana. Sigma Delta Chi was founded at Depauw in 1909.

Keynote speaker was Jane Pauley, NBC-TV anchor and TODAY SHOW host. Jane grew up in nearby Indianapolis. To a full auditorium, Jane gave a thumbnail sketch of her life and how she got into television, first in Indianapolis, then in Chicago, and soon to the Big Apple. She spoke about today’s journalism, and how some people in the industry consider “objective” political reporting “too passive”. It has been one of my complaints that today’s media, mostly newspapers and magazines, insert opinion into supposed news articles on the so-called news pages. Opinion belongs on the opinion page!

Jane Pauley said she thinks today’s news too often finds itself competing with entertainment programs. For this reason, she said, she regularly watches THE NEWS HOUR on PBS because she can count on getting news presented in as objective a fashion as possible.

Near the end of her talk, Jane said she thinks news today must eliminate its opinions in news reports. As she put it, in a rather off-handed way, “One way for the news media to get its niche back….. is to get straight.”

In a question-and-answer session after her main remarks, I went up to the microphone on the left side of the auditorium. She called on me for my question which was a bit long, it ran 90 seconds…but I said that I was attending my second journalism Centennial in less than a year, having attended the Centennial of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri in September, 2007.

I told Jane that I attended quite a few Centennial seminars in Columbia, Missouri, as well as several that day at Depauw University, and at no time did any of the professors or professionals address the great problem of biased journalism “until tonight”.

I went on: when a reporter is sent to cover a speech, he or she must seek to identify the “lead” story or comment by the speaker. I said I thought I heard my lead from Jane Pauley that night: did she say that “one way for the news media to get its niche back is to get straight”, in other words, report the news fairly and objectively?

It was a bit humorous as Jane seemed a bit nervous over what I was going to say about her speech, and then relieved when I finished with this conclusion: “In all of the Centennial seminars I attended, you’re the only speaker to address this very important subject.”

The crowd broke into a loud and prolonged applause. Jane Pauley thanked me for my comments, and said to the other person on stage, the man who introduced her, “I’m not gonna say anything else.” And she walked off the stage as the applause continued.

BOTTOM LINE: that audience was crying out for good journalism, objective, fair, accurate, truthful journalism.

Several people stopped me on the way out of the auditorium to thank me for my comments.

There is no doubt that the general public is quite aware of the biases in journalism, and there also is strong evidence, therefore, that the poor journalism of today is causing problems for newspapers and magazines just as much, if not more, as the Internet.

So, my point is that the starting place for reform in journalism is in the classrooms of America, both for journalism and general education.

So, hey, you journalism professors. You are nice people. But get to work!! Get straight.

Harry Belinger

Harry R. Belinger, four-year Philadelphia City Representative and Director of Commerce, and my boss during that period, died Wednesday, September 23, 2009, of complications of heart surgery at Lankenau Hospital. He was 82.

While I met him after we both received job appointments by incoming Mayor Frank Rizzo (in 1972), Harry primarily was known for his prior posts as City Editor of both the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.

For the most part, my contact with Harry came when he would come once a month to the Philadelphia Civic Center where I was Executive Director. He sometimes would attend the monthly Board meetings at the Civic Center.

As Director of Commerce, he spent far more time at the Philadelphia International Airport, where he was instrumental in finishing the $300 million modernization program there.

He quit the cabinet position with Mayor Rizzo four days after a dispute with the Mayor about union picketing outside the newspapers’ building on Broad Street. An estimated 250 labor union members were protesting what they considered unfair articles about the Mayor.

Harry subsequently became Vice President of Public Affairs for ARA (now known as Aramark).

Harry received a journalism degree from Temple University, and he was a teacher of sorts as newspaper editor. He was of the “old school” of journalists who knew and stressed proper grammar and word usage. Today’s papers are sprinkled with grammatical errors and the like and could benefit from a Harry Belinger-type editor.

I was on the receiving end of one example of his teaching, and I have appreciated what he did ever since. In speaking with him on the phone one day, I said that somebody (the subject of our conversation) “inferred” that he approved whatever we had decided.

I don’t remember the subject, but Harry quickly interjected: “No, he did not infer. He implied. You inferred.” He went on to explain the difference. I think Don Imus, radio star in New York, probably encountered a Harry Belinger somewhere along in his radio career, as Imus took pains on the air on more than a few occasions to outline somebody’s implication and his inference. I wish I would have heard Don Imus before that day on the phone with Harry! However, Harry, still wearing his editor’s eyeshade, so to speak, was both friendly and helpful with his correction. I am pleased to say it was the only time he corrected me!

His wife, Jean, died in 1998. He is survived by their daughter (Lizanne R. Hayes) and two grandchildren. His obituary also listed as survivor his loving companion Rosemary Vickers.

In his obituary writeup, which he prepared for the newspapers five years before his death, he wrote: “Three lives and thoroughly enjoyed the career changes because each change was like being born again.”

Lolly Pannella

Lolly Pannella, my business partner for 30 years, died in her sleep Friday evening, September 18, 2009. Members of her family were with her. Her published obituary is at the end of this post.

Lolly lived only 71 years and exactly seven months. But she poured an active life into this span, a multi-career woman. She was a hard worker throughout her careers, starting as a young woman as a cosmetologist. Those who knew her knew it: hard worker. She was active until lung cancer and liver cancer and their complications slowed her down, requiring several hospital stays, the last being three weeks before her death.

She and I met as a result of our separate contacts with Philadelphia Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo.

Commissioner Rizzo won the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor in May, 1971. At his invitation, I resigned my job as reporter at KYW-TV (now CBS3 in Philadelphia) and joined his campaign. He was elected Mayor in November.

Some people thought I got the greatest job in the campaign. It was my assignment to handle 32 women known as “Rizzo Girls”. Hold your excitement. It was not easy.

The Rizzo campaign manager (Al Gaudiosi) had initiated the efforts to get the Rizzo Girls by contacting a Philadelphia police detective, Frank Pacifico. Frank’s wife was among those selected. Lolly was her close friend and quickly agreed to be a Rizzo Girl, too.

I split the 32 women into eight crews of four each. Some assignments were cushy, but I tried to give each crew approximately the same number of each kind of event. Things went fairly well until a major Rizzo appearance at the Latin Casino. Gaudiosi felt it was appropriate to select Cass Pacifico’s crew as a reward for starting the whole project. Al told me that only four women could be assigned because of the special occasion it was.

Other Rizzo Girls screamed in protest. Lolly phoned me after the event to let me know there was trouble brewing. Rizzo Girls were threatening to quit. I told her what was done on the Latin Casino outing, and why, and Lolly assured me she would try to resolve the issues with the other women. She made a few phone calls, and everybody was happy.

A bullet dodged.

After Frank Rizzo was elected Mayor of Philadelphia, I was appointed by him as Executive Director of the Philadelphia Civic Center.

Only months after starting the job in January, 1972, I was in the middle of negotiations to bring a major league hockey team (Philadelphia Blazers) to the Civic Center (Convention Hall). In May of that year, Vineland trucking company owner Bernard Brown and Attorney Jim Cooper of Atlantic City obtained a franchise to play in Philadelphia starting in October that year. It was a new major league hockey team competing across town against the Flyers.

One of Lolly’s friends and also a Rizzo Girl, Carol Mignogna, was a huge hockey fan, and was very familiar with Bernie Parent, John McKenzie and Derek Sanderson, stars of the Philadelphia Flyers and Boston Bruins, and now with the Blazers. Jim Cooper was the idea man for the startup of the hockey team. One of his ideas was to have young women as ushers, replacing the men who served at the various Civic Center events.

The ushers union protested to me, and after a short war, the men agreed to accept the Blazers demands. The Blazers paid for bright new uniforms for both the men and newly-hired women. Jim Cooper asked me to set up the new “union” (I found out they really had not paid dues nor conducted any union business; it was informal and managed by the union president just so they could handle the work for events such as the Philadelphia 76ers and Ice Follies.)

Jim Cooper wanted a new operation for the ushers, much more identifiable with the Blazers. Carol Mignogna was asked but did not want to manage it. She said she only wanted to watch the games, not work at them. But Lolly was interested.

She formed the Ushering Service of Philadelphia and was the instant boss of 40 ushers. She handled the hiring of the young women (in the old days, you could say “girls”; most were in their ’20′s).

It often is said that success requires being in the right place at the right time. About the same time the new uniforms were first being used, in October of that year, the road manager of Ice Follies asked whether the Blazers would allow their uniforms to be used for the ice show in December. The Blazers agreed.

The road manager (Jerry Walser) during that summer was going to dismiss the woman he had in Philadelphia handling group sales for the ice show. While talking about the ushering arrangements with Lolly, he asked her if she was interested in the group sales job. She was.

So Lolly went from being unemployed (and not job-hunting) in May to having two jobs in the fall. It all stemmed from Frank Rizzo a year before. For the rest of her life, she was a busy woman.

She handled the ushering service even after the Blazers left town (after one year), and during the two years of play of the Philadelphia Firebirds minor league team. (The Firebirds’ General Manager was Robin Roberts, Phillies star pitcher two decades before.) Lolly handled Ice Follies group sales until the show moved to the Spectrum in the late 1970′s.

Both Lolly and I found ourselves out of our jobs at the end of Mayor Rizzo’s second term.

We soon pooled our interests and formed a travel and tour company in 1980, buying what formerly was a Philadelphia boutique (store). We handled all forms of travel, specializing in motorcoach tours. We hired our first employee in 1981. Part of the operation was a travel agency, which made it possible for us to offer cruises and other forms of travel to our motorcoach customers.

In 1986, we bought the first of five motorcoaches we used in the business. We bought the second three years later.

In 1989, we bought the building next door and expanded our staff further.

One of our employees was Marie Bosak, who worked part-time for us and part-time for TWA Getaway group sales. Marie summed up Lolly in the mid-1980′s: “When people sit down in that chair,” she said, pointing to the chair next to Lolly’s desk, “they buy!” Lolly energetically spoke with her customers, who could sense her enthusiasm for the planned trip.

We sold our last three buses at the end of 2004 as part of our plan to retire. Anytime Lolly would hint to a customer that we planned to close up shop, she would hear the wails of a pleading customer: please don’t retire, we NEED you!

In the next two years, we downsized, as the saying goes. We agreed that we should prepare for our retirement. However, in 2007, I needed treatments for prostate cancer and surgery for liver cancer, and during the four-month period, Lolly handled the office alone. Retirement had to be put on hold.

The process on planning to retire resumed in late 2007 as the two of us handled a reduced amount of business, taking care of our best customers, some of whom had been with us for more than two decades, again a tribute to Lolly and her ability to sell and win friends. We each worked in the office three days a week, with Wednesday being the day when we both were on the scene.

On Thursday, November 13, 2008, Lolly left for the day the same as always, not knowing she never would return. Two days later, on Saturday, she was hospitalized. The next day, Sunday, she learned of her cancers.

Soon thereafter, she told me I should proceed with our plans to retire and close up. She said quietly, “You know I won’t be back.”

She waged a courageous 10-month battle.

She was a good lady.

LORETTA J. PANNELLA “LOLLY” (Tirendi)

PANNELLA
LORETTA J. “LOLLY” (nee Tirendi) on Sept. 18, 2009 of Langhorne, PA. Beloved wife of Louis R. Pannella, loving mother of Louis Pannella and Michael (Erica) Pannella, loving daughter of Mary (nee Ruane) Tirendi and the late Anthony Tirendi, dearest sister of Anthony Tirendi, Lewis Tirendi, and Ginger Lorman. She is also survived by her one granddaughter Julia Rose. Relatives and friends are invited to attend her viewing Thursday, from 9:30 A.M. until her Funeral Mass 11 A.M. at The Church of St. Andrew, 81 Swamp Rd. Newtown, PA 18940. Entombment will be in Sunset Memorial Park, Feasterville. In lieu of flowers, contributions in her memory may be made to St. Mary Holistic Center, 215-710-6948.
www.fluehr.com

Kevin is Missing

Last evening, Monday, August 24, 2009, my great grandson Kevin Pierron walked out the back door of my house and vanished. The terrible ordeal was over 3 1/2 hours later, and Kevin was safe. But, as I say, it was terrible, one of those situations you sometimes hear about, but of course hope never happen to you.

Kevin is five years old. I am happy to say that today he attended his first school day, his first of three days of orientation for kindergarten. It was all quite refreshing. In that short period, Kevin actively took part in answering questions about a story all the kids listened to. He was eager and happy to be there, having awakened 45 minutes ahead of the house alarm.

But last evening was not the least bit refreshing.

I was on the way home from the office at 5:15 p.m., made a stop at a pharmacy to pick up two medications, and arrived home at 5:45 p.m.

Kevin had heard my ring of the phone to put the phone on Call Forwarding from the office, so he knew his Pop Pop would be home in a few minutes. He already had been with Grandma (actually, Mom Mom is Great Grandma) to get KFC grilled chicken. He said with some emphasis that he was really hungry.

But at 5:45 p.m., he was outside somewhere. Grandma had twice looked for him in the back yard. No Kevin. However, he often had climbed the cyclone fence to meet up with other hombres of his age or maybe a little older. He almost always was no more than two houses away in the back.

It was puzzling this time because Kevin usually came home at the right time on his own, or others with dinner plans of their own had more or less sent him home.

Kevin’s Uncle, Tom, walked out of the house during this period to go to a band practice. He sometimes has taken Kevin with him, but not this time.

Shortly after 6:15 p.m., with no Kevin yet, I made a couple of searches in the back. I could see nobody in the back yards nor out on the next street over.

As it grew darker, surely he would know to come home, especially since he is so hungry.

But still no Kevin. I got into my car and drove around to the other street, and for the next 20 minutes or so, knocked on doors. I was struck with the hesitancy of people nowadays to open their doors. Maybe it was the time of day; it was just an hour before dark.

After driving up and down several side streets and finding Kevin’s Grandmother (not Mom Mom) visiting a friend two blocks away and telling her Kevin was missing, I returned home for maybe the fifth time and phoned 911.

By this time, two men whom I had contacted in the house visits were joining me in the search in their cars.

A policeman drove up about 7:30 p.m.

He asked for the scenario and soon started a search of the house. He was joined by other policemen, who were thorough in their room by room search. “Sometimes we find kids sleeping under a bed,” said one.

A police sergeant arrived to ask some more questions. The first officer on the scene had taken down most of the vital information, and we had provided him with two photos of Kevin. The sergeant was the friendliest of the contingent; that is, he seemed to be calming and compassionate.

As more police cars were parked outside, the search was expanded to include two playgrounds nearly one mile away and a small park less than one-half mile away.

Police wanted to know where Kevin’s Mother and Father were. Both share custody of Kevin. His Daddy was at work; his mother presumably at home in her apartment three miles away. I do not know whether they actually contacted her, but their questions indicated they were planning to.

For a policeman in such situations, every character in the caper is a suspect. Of course, that’s as it should be.

Later, detectives appeared to ask more questions.

In the meantime, I had finally been able to reach my son, Uncle Tom, to ask him to come home, and I also contacted my daughter-in-law, who was with her husband and their two children having a late dinner out.

Police were driving around the neighborhood from street to street. They were, of course, looking for a little boy. However, their activity attracted attention and that pretty much cracked the case.

Kevin had left our back yard and almost immediately went to a house another half-block away, on a side street that runs into Pearson. The adults there said they saw the police cars driving back and forth, but it did not dawn on them that they might be looking for the little boy who had come to their house.

He had brazenly knocked on their door because he knew a little boy lived there and Kevin wanted to know if he could come in and play. As it turned out, there were three children there so Kevin had new playmates suddenly.

A boy who lived in the house directly in back of us had been Kevin’s constant buddy for more than a year, but he had moved to Georgia in early July, and Kevin really missed having fun with his friend. What we know now is that Kevin spent a number of days looking for a replacement friend or two.

Last evening, he must have been happy as can be with three new friends. They were playing computer games. Kevin, like his Daddy, and his Grandfather, is a computer expert.

I don’t know exactly how Kevin’s presence in the house was revealed. But I was sitting in the living room with the nice police sergeant on a cell phone. He suddenly blurted out: “I think we found him!” I am not very good at controlling my emotions in crises, and I bawled. Sorry. But I didn’t know what “found” meant yet!!

In a minute, Kevin came in the back door, escorted, I think, by the first policeman to have arrived on the scene.

The word got around quickly to the searching policemen, and in a minute, the living room had about eight policemen all trying to listen to Kevin.

In the first place, Kevin seemed somewhat annoyed that they considered him “lost”. “I wasn’t lost.” Kevin protested. Several in his audience replied almost in unison: “But WE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE YOU WERE!!”

They asked him what phone numbers he knew, and although Kevin normally can recite several family phone numbers, he now was speechless as he seemed to start realizing this all was a pretty big deal. Finally, he remembered my office phone number, which seemed to satisfy the policemen.

One policeman, he might have been a Captain, said several neighbors on Pearson had told them Kevin was rather infamous for knocking on their door and asking for candy or kids to play with. This was not a good thing, the policeman concluded.

Obviously, this is something a five-year-old needs guidance on.

He wanted his supper, though three hours late. The grilled chicken was re-heated, but the once-hungry Kevin didn’t eat much.

Today, ironically, during kindergarten orientation, Kevin again met one of the boys he played with last night. The boy’s Mother, who was attending the orientation, told him he is welcome to come and play again, but only if his grandmother is with him to demonstrate that she knows where he is.

Radio Icon Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey, star network radio newscaster for decades, died Saturday, February 28, 2009, at 90. He was on the air within the past year; he was heard nationally for nearly 58 years, since 1951.

I met him six years later (1957).

It was during my year at the School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO. Every Spring, the Journalism School would sponsor “J-Week”, when classes were suspended in favor of students listening to a score or more of journalism professionals, experts in the field, pros who had “made” it. It was a terrific week.

One of my classes that spring was in radio news. I was an “intern” for the early morning newscasts on Radio Station KFRU. This was the same station I worked for each night from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m. It wasn’t fun getting up early but it helped me get through Journalism School in one year.

Among the guest speakers for J-Week was Paul Harvey.

I was told I would assist him in his preparation of his morning newscasts on ABC Radio coast-to-coast. I was told to be there (at the downtown newspaper newsroom from which the newscasts were aired) at 5:00 a.m., a bit tough for somebody who worked till 11:00 p.m. No way he was going to be there at 5:00 a.m., but I was a student. What could I say ??

I got there about 4:55 a.m. and Paul Harvey was waiting for me.

He was about 38 years old at the time, but like most “elders”, to a young guy he seemed like 60. As you might expect, he was all business. He wanted me to sort the copy from the news services, and all I had to do was watch him work. He had gobs of blank newsprint paper. He wrote his copy on this stuff.

To me, the irony was to see how this radio newscasting star prepared his copy. Every story was on a separate sheet of paper. Some of the stories were hardly more than one line long, but I realized this was the “style” his listeners easily tuned to.

He also wanted me to locate all the “kickers” I could find. Wire services often lumped kickers into a single dispatch. A kicker was a funny news story.

He would close his newscasts with a kicker. He always led it off ….. “For what it’s worth”…… Sometimes he would call it “our ‘for what it’s worth’ department”.

Knowing how unfunny the kickers were that morning, I thought he would start hollering at me for not finding at least one good kicker.

I soon got a liberal education in radio journalism, Paul Harvey Style. Paul Harvey took one of the unfunny stories and made it funny. And he always could get away with it, with that two-second pause after he uttered the punch line: “Paul Harvey…………… Good Day!!!”

I was so pleased and frankly honored that I had been selected to be his intern that morning.

His appearance in Columbia climaxed with his speech at the noon luncheon that day. He was one of the J-Week star pros.

Paul Harvey gave a great speech. He was already considered “conservative” and for some at the already liberally-tinged J-School, he was off his rocker. And because he was perceived as somewhat of a comic and cynic on his radio broadcasts, he surprised. He presented a clear description of the waste in government (yes, they even had it way back then) and the various hypocrisies in the news of the day. His audience discovered a conservative is not a whacko.

When he finished, he got a standing ovation.

Dean Earl English then came back to the microphone to thank Paul Harvey, and he brought down the luncheon when he said, rather sheepishly: “There were some of us who weren’t sure about inviting Mr. Harvey, but I must say, after listening to him today, I don’t know how we could have thought anything like that.”

Paul Harvey. Good Day!!!!

Why President-elect Obama won

Even more than a week after the election, nobody seems to be expressing the following points, so maybe the opinions are off the mark. I don’t think so, and I approve this message.

Barack Obama won for five main reasons. There might be 100 more but even the most significant of them only could come in at Number Six.

Here are the five main reasons, about which I will comment at length below: 1) The Media. Everybody can dance around that, but the media represent a highly powerful engine and serve to scare the daylights out of politicians while, with prejudice, sway the thinking of millions.

2) Bush hatred. Let us assume for the moment you don’t need an immediate further explanation for this.

3) The third reason Obama won was, no question about it, Senator John McCain.

4) For Reason Number Four, I copy Rush Limbaugh’s major point, the failure of the Republicans to be conservatives, and let the world know it. I am paraphrasing Rush but I think that’s close to what he said right after Election Day.

5) Reason Number Five is not overkill. It umbrellas a great deal. President-elect Obama knew how to deliver a manuscript speech from a Teleprompter. HIs first news conference after election last week confirms this point when Obama, at the brief news conference, demonstrated he is no master of the ad-lib.

As acknowledged above, there are other reasons that led to the Obama victory. But remember that more than 58,000,000 people voted for McCain, so the 7% difference in votes was anything but a landslide. It also bodes well for the opposition party four years from now if the GOP can wake up from its collective slumbers and blunders. In fact, it bodes well for the GOP in 2010 when the next House of Representatives races come up.

It is not my intention to try to list all the factors identifying victory and defeat. Blacks voted almost entirely for Obama. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin drew many voters to McCain who otherwise might have stayed home on Election Day. She was much more effective than the media are admitting, yet she likely turned away some so-called “moderates” due to the disgraceful trashing she suffered. And so on. Victory has many fathers; defeat is an orphan.

So, back to Reason Number One. Many people in and out of politics do not want to give credit to the ability of the media to control this society. Such people are fooling themselves, but they are falling for the media feints. The media collectively did not just favor Obama; they were in the bag for Obama. They shamelessly bulldozed their biased support. It is a national disgrace and will not be corrected unless or until the people in journalism call cop.

As a generalization, the people in journalism mostly are liberals. That goes double for the educators in college schools of journalism. Generally, they are quite comfortable in their skins. Yet much of their work is journalistic fraud, an abrupt rejection of the Journalist’s Creed, which says “the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its public service”.

If there was news favorable to Obama, it got front-page above-the-fold treatment. If there was a favorable McCain story, it was elsewhere in the paper. If there was a negative Obama story, you often only heard about it on the Fox News Channel. The so-called “Mainstream Media” ignored it, or countered it with bogus angles or otherwise “buried” it.

Deborah Howell in the Washington Post Sunday said stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the Obama candidacy more newsworthy and historic. For example, the op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32. The number of Obama stories during the past year, going back to last November, was 946, compared with McCain’s 786. After Obama eliminated Hillary Clinton, the tally was 626 stories on Obama, 584 on McCain. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain 144. This was just the Washington Post. While we have no comparable statistics, it is pretty safe to say that most newspapers’ coverages would reveal the same percentages of biases.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that from June 9 to November 2, two-thirds of the campaign stories in the national media were about Obama, 53 per cent were about McCain. (Of course, some stories were about both candidates.)

You will find elsewhere on this blog that I do not admire Katie Couric. She has enjoyed a kind of rebirth for her interview in September with Sarah Palin. What a joke. Katie interviewed Palin for two hours and aired just six minutes. Anybody could interview Katie Couric for two hours and clobber her. Couric’s questions were described as fair by the Mainstream Media. Several of those CBS-TV aired were not fair. One was when she asked Palin to list several of the U-S Supreme Court rulings she disagreed with. When the question was aired, I did a double-take, trying to think of even one Supreme Court ruling besides Roe vs. Wade.

I would like to ask Katie to name the last three years’ winners of Movie of the Year. After all, she was star of the TODAY show and should have broad knowledge of news. I would like to ask Katie to name the new President of Russia. She may know now it is Dmitry Medvedev, but “I betcha” she couldn’t have told you three months after he became President. I would like to ask Katie to name the Prime Minister of Canada. Even today. It’s Stephen Harper, Katie. But believe me, in interviewing Katie for two hours, my training would enable me to “sandbag” her in the fashion of the Mainstream Media, including Katie. While it would not be good journalism, it would be revealing. For that matter, Katie interviewed Palin after the Alaskan Governor had been a national candidate for less than a month. Katie would have been easy prey to question a month after she switched to CBS-TV.

Below the radar in the subject of the media, consider the way certain stories become recycled to promote liberal causes. One day I recall USA Today running its top story on an upturn in homeless numbers (the numbers themselves were comparatively insignifcant and would have been ignored with a Democrat in the White House) and across the page was a story about a slump in car sales. Right now the Big Three automakers are in big financial trouble, but do you know the “stimulus package” Obama promoted at his first post-election news conference could be correctly identified as a UAW bailout. The auto workers’ unions exercised their extreme power to achieve wonderful union contracts that cost the Big Three $72 per hour. It takes a lot of dollars to buy a car built by $72 per hour workers. It also costs more than $1,500 in the price of a new car to pay the worker his or her hospitalization costs. Foreign cars have much less in the price for employee medical benefits. For example, Toyota cars have $110 for employee hospitalization.

So when we talk about the Big Three, there is a lot to the story you may not be told. There were similar omissions in the recent political campaign coverage. You were fed liberal viewpoints but rarely conservative ones. And the weight applied almost always leaned toward Obama.

The second reason for the Obama victory, Bush hatred, was an overwhelmingly successful effort by (Reason Number One) the liberal media. President Bush did not receive objective reporting out of the White House and he was not shown the respect the office calls for.

For example, in San Francisco, 12,000 people signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. Classless disrespect.

President Bush endured relentless attacks from the left while concurrently having to see conservatives abandon him.

I did not like everything Mr. Bush did during the past nearly eight years. I thought he should have responded to the opposition diatribes. He thought it would demean the office of the Presidency.

Unlike most Americans who opposed the war in Iraq, I support him. I have heard nobody on either side, really, observe that the Presidential campaign among Democrat Party candidates listed Iraq as the Number One issue. But that was more than a year ago. It hardly came up as an issue during the final two months of the campaign, thanks to the tanking economic news. The fact remains that Al Queda and similar enemies did not repeat the destruction of 9/11 because, frankly, they were afraid of George Bush.

But taken as a whole, no matter what Mr. Bush has done, he was blamed for everything. He remains despised by liberals while continuously disappointing the right, even though it should seem obvious that many of our nation’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush came to office, or are beyond his control.

Ironically, Obama will not suffer in the same disgraceful way. Attacks against Obama as President may sometimes be cruel and slanderous, similar to those against George Bush. But Obama will escape the same barrages because he will enjoy the fawning of a favorable liberally-biased media. Just as during the campaign, the media will serve to protect their chosen one.

Investigative reporter Jeffrey Scott Shapiro in the Wall Street Journal said our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world, he said, how disloyal we can be when our President needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House. It was juvenile; it was often virtually childish.

The media fed off Bush hatred and disseminated it, broadcast it regularly.

The third reason for the Obama victory waS Senator McCain himself. At times I wondered how he could be so unwise as to avoid obvious chances of scoring three-pointers against Obama. McCain could have clobbered Obama on many points, many issues. But he seemed more interested in getting Boy Scout merit badges for good behavior, which helped him not a whit. McCain could have campaigned on the immigraton issue, from a conservative viewpoint. Support legal immigration, oppose illegal immigration. Forget the fact that George Bush was weak on this. In fact, it would have demonstrated a key issue where he disagreed with the President. It would have challenged Obama’s campaign speech that with McCain, you get another George Bush.

McCain was politically less than astute to pull out of Michigan weeks before election day. What a terrible negative image that portrayed. It would have been much better had Sarah Palin not mentioned it, but it demonstrates how reckless the move was that Sarah Palin wanted to see the decision reversed. She just should not have said so pubicly. Obviously, McCain never discussed the move in advance with his running mate. (The only other Palin gaffe, by the way, was her reference to looking toward 2012.) She has to be careful when she speaks her mind. Comments like that do show inexperience, but Palin was one of McCain’s good decisions, and generally, conservatives thank McCain for selecting her. They won’t admit it but liberal media types feared Palin because she was so effective in defining liberalism.

And while we are beating up on John McCain, it is necessary to point out that his silence when there were negative stories did not make him look good. He needed to show some outrage when somebody asked him how many houses he owned. There were several ways he could have answered this that would have prevented the subject from showing up on the late night comedy shows.

And McCain was nothing short of stupid to alienate and ignore Rush Limbaugh.

Speaking of Rush, he described the fourth reason listed here for Obama’s victory. Rush put it at Number One. When you survey the American public, you find many people have more conservative viewpoints than THEY realize. Rush said the Republicans did not run on conservative issues, and this not only hurt them with conservatives but also denied them the opportunity to bring more voters into their camp. So Republicans need to recognize their conservative issues are far more powerful and universally appealing than they realize.

The fifth reason was the way Obama could appear impressive on the stump. He drew big crowds, thanks to extra efforts to attract audiences with rock shows, including that one in Berlin. He was especially effective in reading from a TelePrompter. He was not effective in ad lib situations, but even here, he is better than George Bush who became infamous for speech gaffes. The liberal media ignored Obama’s gaffes, such as when he made the reference to the nation’s 57 states, We don’t have 57 states, do we???

Jimmy Carter was a joke as President, and has continued to be the same as former President. It will be interesting to watch Obama to see if he can avoid becoming the remake of Jimmy Carter. Based on his liberal voting record in the U-S Senate and his leftist views and supporters, it will not be surprising if Obama mirrors Carter. Despite his fawning media, Obama will not have a cakewalk.

Ann Coulter put the status of Politics Twenty-First Century in focus by suggesting that Republicans show Obama the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that Democrats have shown “our recent Republican President”.

A Very Costly “Killed Series”

By John Pierron BJ57

The University of Missouri School of Journalism is celebrating its Centennial September 10-12, 2008, and has asked journalism graduates to provide books, news stories or anecdotes from their careers. Nearly all of the articles submitted are likely to be from broadcast or published news stories. This account, an “anecdote” by John Pierron (BJ 1957), is an exception. It is a summary of a television news series in Philadelphia more than 40 years ago that was killed by a New York lawyer, and what happened thereafter.

The subject of the series itself, and the reason it was killed, though unrelated to each other, are described in this “non-story”, the story that never got on the air. Fortunately, it triggered related stories that kept me on the case of the Philadelphia Boy Wonder Jerry Wolman.

Let me say at the outset the cancellation of the series soured me on the news business. It was not difficult for me to “resign” from it a few years later. At the same time, I never have lost my love for journalism itself.

I have written this “anecdote” on a journalism career mostly as a 2008 story to reflect the developments through the years and concluding with today’s news, some of which is anything but pretty.

The station I worked for was then known as KYW-TV, Philadelphia; the “name” was changed to CBS3 in recent years, and within the past year, the station has received far more than its share of notoriety due to the firing of both of the station’s top/star anchors. I bet that hasn’t happened in your town!

Alycia Lane and Larry Mendte were co-anchors at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. Monday through Friday on Channel 3, Philadelphia. Lane was discharged January 1 of this year, and Mendte was fired June 23. Unbelievable.

Alycia Lane was fired after getting her name in the gossip pages of Philadelphia and New York newspapers too often. The final straw came last December after she was arrested in New York City after Saturday midnight, charged with hitting a New York police officer in a bizarre car stop.

Her co-anchor, Larry Mendte, lost his job after the FBI started investigating allegations that, for about two years, he had snooped on the e-mails of Alycia Lane, and fed gossip about her to the media. Yep, he was spying on his co-anchor: more than 500 e-mails just this year since she was fired! Hundreds more in the two years prior. He was charged in mid-July with a felony: intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization to obtain information. He pleaded guilty in August. Sentencing is scheduled for November, 2008.

I’m not making this up. That’s the CBS3 infamously of today. It is not the kind of news you expect from the original Eyewitness News newsroom.

My anecdote from the 1960′s in some of its ramifications never made it into print. You are reading about it here for the first time, and be forewarned: it does not have the explosiveness of Alycia and Larry.

But it cost you and your friends and neighbors a lot more money, especially if you live in or near a “major league” city.

THE ANECDOTE:

One of the many things you learn at the University of Missouri School of Journalism is word usage. You are taught that the word “very” in nearly all instances is unnecessary, a kind of redundancy, at least in news stories. If you are tired, it says little if any more if you say you are “very” tired. If you are happy, you are happy. It does not say much more to say you are very happy. And so on. Those are quick illustrations describing word usages in a news story.

It is this Mizzou journalism graduate’s clear declaration that if something is VERY costly, it must be VERY extraordinary. Thus, this story about a VERY COSTLY series prepared in the 1960′s is very exceptional and very unique. The actual cost is incalculable. We will just have to agree we are talking megabucks.

Said another way: the result of the cancellation of the series by a New York lawyer cost the taxpayers of the United States many millions of dollars.

The reason the series was spiked was not revealed (to this reporter) until 15 months later. It was bizarre. I will explain that later.

The events described below started in 1963. Jerry Wolman, a Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, one-time grocer, bought the Philadelphia Eagles for $5,505,000. At age 37, he was the youngest owner in the National Football League. In Philadelphia, he soon was known as “The Boy Wonder” as he also was expanding his vistas in the field of construction. He was a fun guy to meet and know, and he was very popular in his new city.

In the mid-1960′s, he was in partnership with co-owners Ed Snider, Bill Putnam and Joe Scott as they put together plans for a franchise in the National Hockey League, which became the Philadelphia Flyers. The team needed an arena to play in. Philadelphia had nothing.

Jerry Wolman proposed building a hockey arena in South Philadelphia. Working with Philadelphia City Council and Mayor James H. J. Tate, he proposed spending $8 million to build it. Key to the plan was to build on city-owned land. Yes, the City was allowing Wolman to build a private facility on city land. So terms had to be arranged. City Council bragged that the Boy Wonder was using his own money to build the arena! The taxpayers can avoid the obligation!! Isn’t that wonderful? That became the typical City Council answer when there was any question about the arena deal.

City administration financial people, working with Wolman and lawyers, put together a 50-year lease that was the sweetest sweetheart Wolman could have hoped for. The cost was $15,000 per year, or $1,250 monthly for 50 years. In addition, he was given a high share of the parking fees on the basis that he needed guaranteed income to pay for his lease. But Wolman had to pay no real estate taxes. You would have to be crazy to think it was not a great deal for Wolman. No real estate taxes. Most of the parking revenues. And a lease he probably could pay off annually with profits from one rock concert each year.

This (City Hall) reporter sought to question all the sweetness. One of my first stops was to see Harry Ferleger, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Civic Center. As they say, FULL DISCLOSURE: in the 1970′s, for eight years I was the Civic Center’s Executive Director after Harry Ferleger. How I got there indirectly stems from this anecdote caper but is not parcel to this story.

Harry Ferleger was glad to see me. He said he had to be careful with what he said, but Mayor Tate knew of his opinions and concerns, and he was authorized if not encouraged to speak more or less as a concerned city official. He told me he had reviewed the arena planning (this was before the facility got the name “Spectrum”). What it revealed was that, thanks to City Council, the taxpayers were on the eve of giving Jerry Wolman a license to print money. He knew the Civic Center would lose the Philadelphia 76ers as a tenant, and that was OK, he thought. But he pointed out that basketball revenues that had been coming into the city coffers for many years would now be going to Wolman. The future of the arena business was to be rock and other concerts, and Wolman would be getting that (moolah), too. Not the Civic Center and the city’s tax coffers.

Also, he said, the Ice Follies and Ice Capades and the circus road shows surely would want to move to the larger, new arena. Should the city’s taxpayers underwrite this, seeing these revenues go elsewhere? It was more money destined for Wolman’s deepening pockets.

Subsequently, Harry Ferleger stood outside Convention Hall (part of the Civic Center complex) and spoke to me in a fairly lengthy filmed TV news interview, which became the main theme of the five-part series I wrote and edited. He would not tell me on film what he had offered in his office: the City Council hearing on the arena lease, which took a mere one hour in Council chambers (without public hearing for taxpayers), was a sham, a joke. City Council did not call him for testimony (Ferleger thought it was on purpose), and the comments offered by the learned Council members were either extremely naive (unlikely) or wink-wink let’s-get-this-done-in-a-hurry.

Of course, he couldn’t describe the Council hearing for what it was if he wanted to keep his job.

Working with our News Director Al Primo, we prepared five scripts, complete with film for each night’s series segment. The series declared that City Council had given Wolman a “lucrative” lease for the new arena. I said this in the first sentence of my copy.

Said in brief, the key to the whole issue was the mathematics. Rock shows had just started to become popular, and Harry Ferleger wanted to see the City and its taxpayers get the revenues to be achieved, not Jerry Wolman.

Al Primo told our station General Manager, Fred E. Walker, we had a hot series ready for air. Fred was totally in support of the series, but thought the word “lucrative” could get us sued. He arranged for the three of us to go the offices (a few blocks away) of Dechert Price & Rhoads, the station’s legal counsel. The head of the law firm of more than 200 lawyers and the firm’s chief Vice President in charge of financial law greeted us, and we sat down to discuss what we had. I was told to read out loud each of the five reports. Where there was a sound-on-film interview, they accepted my ad lib comments as to what the spokesman said. The key concern was that word “lucrative”.

The financial officer said it was his opinion that the overwhelming evidence of both the mathematics of the bookings and the obviously sweet “lucrative” lease clearly demonstated the series represented “fair comment and criticism” under the laws of libel.

He said the series did not even hint of libel and needed to be broadcast to the people of Philadelphia. I sat there, shall we say, very, very happy and I am pleased to say Fred Walker and Al Primo walked back with me to the station similarly elated. We knew we had a big story.

A few days later, we were on the eve of station promotionals to “plug” the series when Al called me into his office.

“We have to go back to Dechert Price and Rhoads,” he said. He said Fred Walker had received a call from the Group W (station owner) corporate office in New York, which was sending a lawyer to Philadelphia to review the series. The reason?? Al Primo had no clue, nor, I later found out, did Fred Walker, although he apparently had phoned New York, the Group W corporate office, to crow a bit about how we had a story that should stop City Council from a major taxpayers gift to the Boy Wonder.

Nevertheless the series was “on hold” and of course so were the news promotions.

In a day or so, back we were in that same law firm conference room, and this time a (six feet four inches tall) unfriendly, unsmiling Group W lawyer walked in, shook hands all around. He asked that I read the series as I had a few days before.

You had to be there. It was most bizarre. As soon as I started and passed the word “lucrative”, the New Yorker shook his head, but did not interrupt. Everybody froze, though. I saw that. As I continued, the head-shaking continued at periodic points, and I could see the financial officer trying to get a facial read from his law partner, the head of the firm.

When I finished, the New York lawyer quickly declared that the series was generally faulty and probably libelous, and it could not be aired. The Philadelphia lawyers wanted better clarifications, but the New Yorker was abrupt and offputting, and before we realized it, he was getting up with his briefcase and heading for the door. Decision made.

After the New Yorker left to return to the Big Apple, the financial officer felt compelled to tell us he thought the New York lawyer was crazy.

The three of us from the station walked back in a daze, trying to figure it all out. We could come up with no explanation. We all felt we were had, for some reason.

Turns out, we were. And so were the taxpayers of Philadelphia, and subsequently the taxpayers in cities and towns all over the United States.

This year, I contacted Fred Walker and Al Primo for comments about the 1960′s arena series. FULL DISCLOSURE AGAIN: Earlier this summer, neither could remember the series and the trips to Dechert, Price and Rhoads. I did not understand this but I accepted it, of course. (In early September, after reading a copy of this anecdote, Al Primo sent an e-mail saying that now he did, in fact, recall the saga. For a while, the writer here was questioning the writer’s own level of senility.)

After the series kill, our “non-story” got around. The whisper campaign assured that the rumor was spread: Channel 3 killed a series that basically said the arena deal was a colossal nightmare and probably precedent-setting. I know I told one particular influential figure who did not keep the story quiet. But it never went public until the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the lease, and yes, described it with that very word: “lucrative”.

Ironically, this was in connection with my Jerry Wolman scoop.

While the arena was under construction (it opened in the Fall of 1967) or soon thereafter, Jerry Wolman suffered a devastating setback on his major construction project in Chicago, the 100-story skyscraper John Hancock Building. He was prime contractor. The ground sank at the site. It cost him $20 million and started him on the road to bankruptcy.

I found this out, and told the News Director. However, I had just one source, and this source only could speculate that it would have negative implications for the Eagles, the arena and the new hockey team . And the News Director was scared. He feared we would be sued for libel, and KYW-TV would end up paying for the John Hancock Building. I realized the vulnerability, of course. And besides, Jerry Wolman already had reached icon status with his Philadelphia Eagles and it was impossible to know how deep his financial troubles extended.

It took nine months to get my scoop on the air. And I still was first with the story.

I had kept in touch with the Jerry Wolman news in the intervening months, so my source tipped me that Wolman, a Jewish man, was about to do the seemingly unthinkable: he was heading to Kuwait to seek a 43-million-dollar loan. From Arabs!!!! My story did not need to include this tidbit, and didn’t. It was blockbuster without the Mideast problem needlessly overshadowing it.

Because our newsroom knew all about Jerry Wolman’s problems for months, it no longer was a belabored decision to LEAD with the story on the 11 p.m. newscast one Friday night. I know Vince Leonard, newscaster, enjoyed the thrill of delivering the opening line, saying that Philadelphia Eagles owner Jerry Wolman is “on his way” TO TRY TO SAVE HIS FINANCIAL EMPIRE. Then he turned it over to me and I was able to give the total story “live” on camera in by then typical Eyewitness News coverage. In those days Channel 3 news was way ahead of the opposition and enjoyed a much larger audience and therefore higher ratings.

The Wolman story really had come out of the blue, so to speak, as far as the public was concerned. Shortly after I finished, I had a phone call from a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter (City Hall guy the same as I) who desperately wanted help on matching the story. He said his editor was screaming at him for not having it, as though it was some halls-of-City Hall story. I told him it took me nine months to get to tonight, and while I understood his comments, he should not be the least bit ashamed at being scooped, as it was a very long and sometimes frustrating saga. However he did it, he put together a fairly accurate front-page story in the Sunday Inquirer.

This reporter, Don McDonough, in writing follow-up stories years later, having heard my sad tale about the killing of the series, used that word “lucrative” (in print) in including reference to the arena lease more than once.

In November, 1967, with the new arena just opening, Wolman called a news conference to confirm that he was in a financial squeeze. He blamed a tight money market. That never was my understanding.

Now that Jerry Wolman no longer was hands-off insofar as any negative publicity was concerned, the arena lease came in for public review. A lawsuit was filed in United States District Court in effect contending that the taxpayers of Philadelphia had been defrauded. In 1971, U. S. District Judge A. Leon Higginbotham ruled. It might have been one of the first “modern” examples of a judge legislating from the bench. The basic charge was that the Spectrum paid no real estate taxes. But the Judge ruled the arena was situated on city ground that was used for a “public” purpose. Therefore, the City Council lease was legal and proper. The sins were in the terms of the lease.

Some lawyers considered the ruling a stretch. Nonetheless the federal court declared in loud language that a private entity, frankly, could receive sweetheart deals in the creation of public assembly facilities. It really started the ball rolling.

For much of the past 40 years, since Jerry Wolman, taxpayers have opened up their wallets to pay bills for wealthy sports team owners. Philadelphia was first, and Judge Higginbotham served as the legal enabler in a stretch of what public purpose should accrue to the pockets of a private citizen (i.e., Jerry Wolman). People defending Wolman back there in the 1960′s pointed out that Wolman’s own $8 million would pay for the arena. But remember he did not have to pay for the land (valued at perhaps $6 million) and he got that lucrative lease. That word has been a buzz word ever since, especially by those opposing taxpayer financing of public assembly facilities and sports franchises. Example: in a New York Times article on the subject published July 27, 1996, writer Leslie Wayne wrote:

EVEN AS MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR SPORTS PALACES ARE BEING PROPOSED FOR ASSORTED BEARS, BENGALS, HAWKS, VIKINGS AND OTHER PROFESSIONAL TEAMS, A LOT OF PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON WOULD LIKE TO CLAMP DOWN ON LUCRATIVE PUBLIC SUBSIDIES THAT THEY CONTEND DO MUCH MORE TO HELP ALREADY-WEALTHY PROFESSIONAL SPORTS TEAM OWNERS THAN THE COMMUNITIES THAT SUPPORT THE TEAMS.

The article said the controversy over stadium financing dated back to the 1986 Federal Tax Reform Act, which was thought to have eliminated the public subsidies by forcing team owners to finance stadiums with taxable, rather than tax-free, dollars. The effort, however, backfired.

The National Taxpayers Union has written extensively about the “spending spree”. It said that although a casual observer might believe the flood of tax dollars poured into new stadiums sprang from some public mandate, appearances are deceiving. When asked, taxpayers generally oppose spending tax dollars to build stadiums. This margin of disapproval probably would be even higher were it not for extreme pressure from public figures, and the media-fueled belief that bad publicity associated with losing a sports franchise will harm their city’s image.

The Taxpayers Union declares that those who favor stadium subsidies cite a variety of economic and emotional arguments to influence taxpayers. Many of these are disingenuous or are based on inadequate data and the misinterpretation of economic principles. It is safe to say that regardless of what stadium backers claim, taxpayers are not getting the most for their money. So said the taxpayers union.

So the upshot in 1967: Jerry Wolman no longer could afford his first love, the Philadelphia Eagles. I made a half-dozen trips to United States District Court in Baltimore to attend the hearings of the Bankruptcy Referee (starting in April, 1968) that climaxed with Wolman being forced to sell the team to Leonard Tose for $16.1 million, at the time a record price for a professional sports team.

I interviewed both of them (TV sound-on-film) together on the federal courthouse steps a half-hour after the Referee issued his peculiar ruling.

This is perhaps the only somewhat amusing aspect of this whole story, although Jerry Wolman would not agree. What the Referee did that day when Leonard Tose was introduced to the Philadelphia TV audience (yes, we were the only station covering the hearing, so it was an easy exclusive) was presented in the form of a suggestion from the bench.

The Referee said he would approve Wolman retaining the Eagles if Tose would agree to loan him the money which he (Tose) would borrow from the huge First Pennsylvania Bank. I could tell Tose did not like it, but he was powerless to say so in my interview. He came across as Wolman’s best buddy, although Leonard Tose wanted the Eagles late that afternoon as much as Wolman wanted to keep them.

The next morning, I got a call from John Bunting, Chairman and President of First Pennsylvania Bank. He had watched my interview the prior evening and asked me to clarify what I had reported for his legal and financial officers. Imagine that! John Bunting’s office was just a two-block walk from the station and I got there at 10:30 a.m. There were eight people in the room (sorry, ladies, this was the 1960′s; they were all men).

John Bunting started: “Now, John, we appreciate your coming over here to explain your story. I think I heard you clearly, but some of these men didn’t have you on. What you said is that the Federal Referee suggested that we should loan the money to Tose (he paused, I nodded) and he will loan it to Wolman???”

Right. The bankers all shook their heads not unlike that New York lawyer.

Right there, I had my last Jerry Wolman story. He would lose the Eagles.

Some days later, I saw him and asked him about the reporting on his financial difficulties. When he returned from the Middle East without that loan, was he told who reported on his threatened bankruptcy? He said he knew I was the reporter. What I wanted him to know, though: it took me nine months to get the story on the air!

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, with his usual big and winning smile. I was dumbfounded. Why? I asked. And I still don’t know exactly how to understand his answer, no financial wizard I. He said: “You would have saved me alotta money if you reported it when you first knew it.”

Jerry Wolman never got to enjoy his arena. Because he could not afford it, the arena had to be operated under the protection of federal bankruptcy court. Ed Snider, who had been a Vice President of the Eagles and Wolman’s partner, took over the operation of both the arena and the Flyers.

Suffice it to say that Snider became a super mogul and a very, very (emphasis intentional, and School of Journalism guidelines roundly considered) wealthy man. The newly-named Spectrum made great history for Philadelphia sports and entertainment over the years. Snider got all the plums that Jerry Wolman might have enjoyed if that Chicago ground was not so squishy.

A key reason Snider escaped greater scrutiny over the lucrative lease was quick in coming after the Spectrum opened. At a matinee of the Ice Capades in February, 1968 (four months after the opening), as spectators waiting for the show to start watched in amazement, high winds ripped away a 50-by-100 foot section of the Spectrum roof and sent it crashing to the ground outside. This added to the overall arena financial woes, and Snider quickly became a sympathetic figure, shrouding the friendly lease terms.

More than 20 years ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer provided keen perspective into Edward Malcolm Snider.

“I had decided to bring a National Hockey League franchise into Philadelphia”, Snider said. “And to do that, the Spectrum had to be built. We would build the arena with private funds, and the city would get extra revenue without spending a dime. Everyone thought it was a fabulous deal at the time.”

Not everyone, Ed.

“So we started the construction, and Wolman and I ended our partnership. I got the Flyers, he got the Spectrum. When the Spectrum went bankrupt, I stepped in and paid off the debts 100 cents on the dollar.”

In that same era, the President of the Philadelphia Phillies at the time, William Y. Giles, said: “Ed Snider has to rank as one of the most successful and imaginative sports entrepreneurs ever. With the exception of the O’Malley family and the Dodgers, I cannot think of anyone else who has made a lot of money on a sports franchise. Most people make their money somewhere else, then buy a team.”

Another stretch.

In “Ballpark Boondoggle”, a summary of the public funding of arenas and stadiums by the National Taxpayer Union, the largesse given to sports franchise owners is described at length. The article points out that not all businesses can get away with what sports franchises do. If Wal-Mart and Home Depot depended on taxpayer subsidies to meet payroll, they would not be in existence very long. Taxpayers would rebel at this type of corporate welfare and Wall Street would devalue the company’s stock.

“Professional sports franchises are different,” says the National Taxpayer Union. “Because they are closely identified with the cities where they play and are frequently mentioned in the media, sports teams hold a special place in the fabric of many American cities.”

The origin of largesse for the owners and operators of sports and public assembly facilities clearly originated in the City Council of Philadelphia in the mid 1960′s.

City Council did not want Harry Ferleger to testify. The impact of this has been multiplied into millions and millions of taxpayer dollars. City and other public financial people (at the state and federal levels) do not want to conduct serious and accurate analyses of how much public money has been wasted (funneled into the deep pockets of wealthy sports franchise owners) due to the tremendous public relations and taxpayer backlash that would occur.

The taxpayers are left with having a good (or bad) cry.

Actually, the Spectrum will not be able to fulfill all of its obligations over 50 years, the lease term. This year, it was announced that the now-named Wachovia Spectrum, “the city’s oldest major professional sports venue”, will be demolished next spring to make way for a proposed hotel, retail and entertainment complex.

“This has been one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” Snider said. “The Spectrum is my baby.”

Need we mention that the new project, known as “Philly Live!”, will be built on city-owned land?

So, what was that New York lawyer up to? Why was the Eyewitness News arena series killed, and killed so abruptly, without even the suggestion of a re-write, perhaps?

Fifteen months after the lawyer went back to Group W headquarters in New York, I came to work one morning and was told that “MacDonald” wanted to see me.

MacDonald was Kenneth T. MacDonald, KYW-TV Vice President and General Manager, who had replaced Fred Walker.

The newsroom was abuzz about why Pierron, a reporter, was being called into the big (and new) boss’ office. Most unusual.

I went from the Eyewitness News newsroom on the second floor to the executive offices on the third floor, somewhat fearful, but telling myself that I soon would know the why.

He obviously knew his summons was unusual. “Come in, John. No problem!!” he assured me.

He explained that the station, the previous evening, had hosted its annual sales staff – clients’ cocktail party. Advertising and broadcast executives from New York and Washington came to Philadelphia to rub elbows and mutually thank each other for the high Channel 3 ratings.

I do not remember whom MacDonald referenced. He did identify the fellow from the Group W offices in New York.

“John, he asked me: WHAT EVER BECAME OF THAT REPORTER WHO HAD YOUR ARENA SERIES?” said Ken MacDonald.

He was unfamiliar with the whole saga, and wanted me to add the final details.

What Kenneth T. MacDonald told me, though, rather turned my stomach.

He asked the New York broadcast executive to explain. Remember this was at the annual Channel 3 sales department cocktail party.

The New Yorker said that it more or less had been an amusing story around the Group W headquarters that the lawyer had been instructed to go down to Philadelphia, and kill the series, whatever the hell it was. He was told not to bother to come back to New York if he didn’t.

Ken MacDonald was all ears. (And it was nice of him to think I should know about it, more than a year later.)

The New Yorker said there were five executives at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh who were working confidentially to combine to buy the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Pittsburgh men were acting as private citizens, and knew Jerry Wolman was having money troubles. The team could not be purchased by a corporation, but some of its officers could do so on their own.

The Jerry Wolman financial situation presumably was a known quantity in both New York and Pittsburgh. Looking back, this was not difficult to believe, as former Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilworth was representing Wolman in seeking big loans from New York banks (which they did not obtain).

MacDonald said the Pittsburgh executives feared that any news series about Jerry Wolman would spoil their secret efforts to own an NFL franchise.

Said bluntly: electric company executives engaged in private activity for their own personal gain had tampered with a news story in the company’s broadcast division.

My bosses obviously wanted to keep their jobs, so the sequel to the series also went unreported. Until now.

On Getting Prostate Cancer and Liver Cancer, Too

It is mid-July, 2007. I figure I’d better write about this now so I do not forget what happened. On the other hand, how could I ever forget what is happening every day!

Earlier this year, at winter’s end, I got a call from my urologist of 25 years.

UROLOGICAL ASSOCIATES, PC Jay J. Handler, M. D., F. A. C. S., Urology and Urologic Surgery located in the Calvanese Building Suite 2D 2137 Welsh Road Philadelphia, PA 19115 phone 215-698-7333 (fax 215-673-9492).

“I have your test results back. They are not normal,” he said.

He told me I have prostate cancer, something that affects one in six men. It is fatal for one man in every 34 with the disease.

My urologist said the PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) readings were borderline, but he was especially concerned because they had doubled in the past year. He scheduled an in-office visit. In his office, he told me the conclusion was unmistakable: I needed a program to get rid of the cancer.

He said he wanted me to attend a meeting involving other men also recently diagnosed with cancer of the prostate. I did. During the meeting, I asked the oncologist “how fast does the cancer grow”. The reply: “very slowly”. But the key is to attack it at your earliest time.

MNAP Oncology Center Department of Radiation Oncology Steven J. DiBiase,M. D. 9908 East Roosevelt Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA 19115 www.mnaponcology.com phone 215-673-9260 fax 215-673-9254.

At that meeting, it seemed to me that the suggestion of side effects from the radiation centered on NOT TO WORRY about them. Some men have problems during the treatments, many do not. That may well be true, but not in my case. If I have any criticism of the program, it is that the full measure of possible side effects was not conveyed.

I started the radiation treatments May 29th, the day after Memorial Day. This was about two months after that meeting in the urologist’s office.

I was given the appointment time of 9:20 a.m. each day. I was to be scheduled between a breast cancer patient and another man. The daily nods of “Hello” soon became routine, but I must admit my friendly demeanor, if perceived, was orchestrated.

This is because after a week of treatments, the side effects started. Pain during urination. Frequency of urination. Dizziness. Nausea. Exhaustion. Loss of appetite.

I was told the pain during urination could be controlled. After my experience these past six weeks, I need to tell you there has been, at least in my case, almost no control of the pain.

It has been vicious. And ongoing. Every 10 to 15 minutes. And more often than that. Urgency to go. And then, just a trickle, but terrible pain.

I told the doctor of the pain. I told him I usually could not make it to the bathroom before I started going. By the time I got to the toilet, the only thing left was the excruciating pain of the last trickle. He gave me a prescription (Phenazopyridine) designed to increase the flow, and he also gave me a prescription for Flomax, the recently-heavily-advertised pill for those with a “going problem”.

Still, pain.

I asked the second doctor (on duty that day) if there was any other relief. She said another possible remedy would be ibuprofen along with the Phenazopyridine and Flomax. This could be in the form of Advil or Motrin. I bought both. So, in addition to the two prescriptions, I was now taking ibuprofen. At first I was taking 600 mg four times a day. Doctor Number One at the oncology center a week later suggested I cut down from three capsules four times a day to two. This is because I also take Plavix, a well-known prescription for heart patients. However, so long as your urine and stool do not become bloody, the Plavix may continue. That’s the way it is with me, with the Plavix continuing to protect my heart and blood lines.

It should be noted here that ibuprofen is NOT recommended if your kidneys are not working well. I only can conclude that the oncology doctor was not aware that my kidneys were starting to emerge as new problems amidst everything else. (See below for more on this.)

Through these weeks, the pain continued. A urinalysis was ordered, and my family doctor also tested me.

Family Doctor: Frankford Avenue Family Practice, P. C. 8846 Frankford Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19136 215-332-8221 fax 215-332-2979 Paul H. Miller, D. O.

Earlier this week, my family doctor (Dr. Miller) said I have developed a kidney disease of some sort, and I will need to get an ultrasound (next Thursday), and see a specialist, a nephrologist, a week or two later in July. A nephrologist is a physician who has been educated and trained in kidney diseases, kidney transplantation and dialysis therapy.

Before you draw any conclusions, I need to explain: all four doctors are top-notch. They all attended college classes the days the professors discussed bedside manner. They learned well. They are good.

And I was told that most men do not encounter the side effects that have hit me. (One evening, in my office, I threw up so much and so long, I would have to say it was the home run of vomits in my life.)

I am sorry for the graphic descriptions here but I need to be totally forthcoming for you. Prostate cancer is curable, and has a high success rate. But it is not an easy road. I have heard about patients getting chemotherapy who have suffered far more than I. Just today, in the Philadelphia Daily News, there was an item about Gary Papa, sportscaster for Channel 6 here in Philadelphia. His prostate cancer has returned. He thought he had licked it more than two years ago. He now has another fight on his hands. I do not know what stage of prostate cancer he had three years ago. But according to the Daily News item, “an emotional Gary Papa announced” during yesterday’s 6 p.m. newscast that he is undergoing a second round of chemotherapy. I believe chemo is used most often when the radiation clock already is at midnight.

As of this day, Saturday, July 14, I have had 31 radiation treatments. The usual series is 39 or 40. Before I started, I was asked to add four more for purposes of a survey. Total 44. I agreed. Last week, I asked out of the final four, but the doctor urged me to hang in there. So far, I still have 13 to go, not nine. Despite the pain, I suppose I will try to hang in there.

I should point out what you probably already have concluded: my experience may be unique, and very well may be unusual among the many patients at my oncology center. However, I think I know why the doctors did not “announce” at that original session with more than a half-dozen men that the side effects are brutal. If they described the pain, the urgency and so on, probably they would see some of their patients seek another opinion. I want to hasten to add that I do not criticize the doctors because nobody at that original session asked, in effect, how bad can it get?

In between the urgencies, I am OK but always exhausted. I am writing this on a Saturday evening when I have had to stop periodically to run to the bathroom. And most of the time today, it has been very painful when I urinate. Oh, and I forgot to mention the diarrhea: yeah, I get that, too. Sometimes it consumes my morning. And maybe most embarrassing of all of it: I am wearing diapers on the basis of a recommendation from the woman doctor at the oncology center. But it helps. Before diapers, I was soiling five and six underwear jockeys each day.

I cannot walk from my car into my house without becoming out of breath. I hardly can walk from my office to the bank, less than a block away.

The woman doctor at the oncology center suggested I contact my family doctor to check whether I should continue to take the ibuprofen since a kidney disease was suggested by the one urinalysis. My family doctor said the ibuprofen does adversely attack the kidneys; he suggested Tylenol. No offense to Tylenol, but the pain came back today stronger than during the past week.

But I trust my family doctor and will stay with the Tylenol. Maybe its good days are ahead of me.

If you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, prepare to fight it as you would any anomaly. The doctors deal with the several treatments and patient care on a daily basis. You should not shy away from the necessity of treatment.

Maybe my comments above will help you to ask more direct questions about the side effects of radiation. My business partner’s husband was treated earlier this year at the same treatment center as I. He finished his 40th treatment May 1. Yet, in mid-June, he still had some of the agonies described above. So radiation lingers.

I never sought a “second opinion” partly because of the experiences of my partner’s husband. We both have the same urologist, who impresses me as no less than an expert in his field. A nice guy, too. And, as noted above, all four doctors treating me are superb. And nice people. Bedside manner, so to speak, is needed for those patients undergoing chemo and/or radiation.

Since reading about Gary Papa, another nice guy, I have been preoccupied thinking about the recurrence of prostate cancer. Gary first disclosed his cancer in May, 2004, actually. So his came back and the article did not explain why.

Thus, despite an apparent high success cure rate, chemo or radiation may not be enough. It demonstrates the need for men to be tested at least once a year, if not more. My “not normal” readings were part of a four-times-a-year blood test in the office of my family doctor. As apparently happens in most cases, once you are known to have prostate cancer, your friends are quick to give you reassurances, based on other cases with which they are familiar.

Earlier in these remarks, I mentioned that the treatments started about two months after my urologist reported the findings. The two-month period apparently is inevitable, due to the several steps that must be taken prior to radiation. Of course, it had been a biopsy which revealed the cancer. That was first after the blood test. And while nobody said so, and I didn’t ask, apparently it takes a while just to prepare the paper work involving a patient’s hospitalization plan. But as far as I could tell, this did not “delay” treatment.

An early procedure, with advance preparations similar to a biopsy (fasting, etc.) was to insert three “markers” on my lower stomach. These markers are not visible to the naked eye, but are evident on a machine. Each treatment requires the drinking of 1 1/2 cups of water just before the treatment. This serves to lift the prostate into better position for radiation.

There are three treatments (i.e., three patients) each hour, 20 minutes apart, at my oncology center. The actual radiation procedure takes about 12 minutes for one person, and only starts when the technicians are satisfied they have lined up the radiation machinery according to those three markers. This assures them that the radiation is going directly to the prostate gland, regardless of its position, which changes from day to day.

And about those technicians. They do a great job. The crew for each patient almost always involves two women, sometimes three. They even have to place my legs in a cast, which was created prior to the radiation treatment program. There are scores of those casts on the shelves of the radiation room. A lot of men are under treatment for prostate cancer. Likewise, the women patients who are battling breast cancer go through essentially the same procedures. The women technicians are friendly where the situation desperately calls for “friendly”. The same goes for the rest of the small staff, including three women at the front desk (at least two are nurses who once a week take my blood pressure, weigh me and ask me howzit goin’ now, and so on; let’s call one of them Heidi, who is warmly friendly each day and who has her own pleasing bedside manner, so to speak). The others are professionals, too. And the young woman in the “Interview Room” (she does the leg casts) gives you a heartwarming smile every time she walks by. Where is she going all the time?

Anyhow, now, I am about to head into my last 13 treatments. I know it will continue to be a struggle; I more or less figure I will continue to go through the agony until weeks after the treatments end August 1. But let me hasten to add: I have thought not infrequently about the alternative. What if there were no treatment? Many patients die of cancer yearly because the cancer maybe was diagnosed too late to avoid its becoming an eventual killer. So while I am concerned about the remaining treatments, and the aftermath, which may not ebb until mid-September, I am even more concerned for Gary Papa.

_______________________________________________________________________________

After the above summary was posted, there was a visit three days later (Tuesday, July 17th) with the oncologist doctor right after Radiation Treatment 33.

I told the doctor I was spent in more ways than one. He replied that he thought I was depressed. Inasmuch as I rarely become depressed, I told him it could not be depression: it was the hot poker pain and the other maladies described in the summary above. I suggested that he READ it to understand my dilemma better. He said he preferred just to continue with the interview. I know he’s busy, but I rather think he was not fully grasping the severity of my many discomforts.

At some point on this day (Tuesday, July 17th) or before, the doctor had suggested I might be suffering from a urinary tract infection.

In any case, the next day (Wednesday), I received Treatment Number 34, after which the doctor met with me again (normally, he meets with each patient once a week). Heidi took my blood pressure and reported it to the oncologist. It was 88 over 50. It demonstrated I was in poor shape with low blood pressure.

The doctor suggested that I was dehydrated and needed to go for hydration somewhere.
The conclusion was to go to the Emergency Room at Frankford-Torresdale Hospital, about seven minutes’ drive, “for an hour or two”, the oncologist speculated. He asked whether I was able to drive myself. I replied that I could drive throughout the radiation period, despite fatigue and shortness of breath, if I took a few minutes to recover. So I got in my car just minutes before Heidi would have been calling for an ambulance. Getting to Frankford-Torresdale was not a problem, and the ER was just as the doctor had suggested: few patients waiting at that time, about 10:20 a.m., unlike the scene most nights, when you may not get “seen” for hours, due to the many people ahead of you (if you are not an emergency-emergency case, which would mean you would be taken much sooner).

Thus, last Wednesday (July 18th), I started what turned into an eight-day hospital stay.
Within minutes, I was being interviewed by Nurse Linda Nowak, who also doubled as my ER nurse. She was the first of a zillion top-shelf nurses to treat me both in the ER and in the Telemetry Unit and thirdly in one of the regular wards. I was placed in the Telemetry Unit Wednesday night due to my heart attack two years ago when I spent three days at the same hospital. In the ER I had been put on a heart monitor. By the way, they are “wireless”. Pretty snazzy.

When I was in what became my ER room for about 10 hours, Linda Nowak told a male nurse “UTI” was suspected. UTI is hospital lingo for Urinary Tract Infection.

The doctors and nurses in the ER had plenty to do and having been there in the past, I know the activity often is big time hectic. However, the hospital personnel proceed with high professionalism, and take pains to make sure they get my medical history and names of my doctors. As noted in the summary above, I had quite a bit to report. Soon after arrival, the male nurse inserted a “line” for IV and I was told I would be getting “fluid” that would hydrate me.

But as for the pain during and after urination, I was told it was likely I had an infection in the urinary tract which in large measure was the main culprit for the pain.

After I was in the Telemetry Unit, doctors and nurses combined to diagnose the ills and try to alleviate my situations. Included were the periodic runs to the bathroom to urinate. I made it on time about half the time. Because of the urgencies described above, in no time I was spreading the “orange” on the bed sheets, all over the floor and on and near the toilet, the orange being the result of the medication I was taking.

The easing of pain throughout my stay could not be sustained.

More often than not the nurses changed day to day. “Mari Pat” and her Nurse’s Aide, Terry, were on duty two days in a row last Thursday/Friday. But the schedule changes, and this is highly significant, did not result in any reduction in the level of care or caregiver knowledge.

As you would see on another summary on this site, I do not regard lawyers as the Number One saviors of our society. I recognize some of them perform outstanding service, but we have far too many of them in this country (read “LAWYERS ARE RUINING OUR SOCIETY”) and far too many of them literally or figuratively chase too many ambulances.

It may be that the Oath of Lawyers says to first do harm, as they often do. (Some judges and the judicial system also aren’t squeaky clean; we need also to remember that.)

You would think that doctors are the scourge of lawyers, and of course some physicians seem not to operate by the Hippocratic Oath (irrespective of which Oath form you consider). The original, it generally is concluded, goes back to good ole Hippocrates, the father of medicine in the fourth century BC.

The doctors I have encountered over the years for the most part have been professional, hard-working and dedicated to my care.

I have not followed the medical procedures in recent years, but apparently my family doctor, your family doctor, cannot come into a hospital to see his/her patients. At Frankford Torresdale during the past week, I was seen by, I think, two hospital doctors and a half-dozen specialists.

My main doctor was a turban-attired Medical Doctor by the name of Bakhshish S. Sandhu. I had the feeling he had 1,000 patients there. He also has a private practice. He would visit me each morning; it was somewhat tornadic. But I mean that in a nice way. He was terse and at first I wasn’t prepared for his quick exit. He usually came into my room so early in the morning that I was still more than half-asleep as he spoke with me. What I realized soon enough is that I had to ask a question quickly, as he was so much on point, I almost wished I had a tape recording of his visits. Soon, however, I realized there was plenty going on in his brain at its own cyclonic speed. This was evident not only in his quick analyses and decisions but in what the nurses were able to tell me, and do. It was impressive.

It was the conclusion at ER the first evening, before transfer to my room, that I needed two “units” of blood. The transfusions (two pints, I suppose) took from midnight till 6:00 a.m. Thursday. My dizziness and shortness of breath abruptly stopped with the blood.

On Friday morning, a lab technician took 10, yes, 10 vials of blood from me. At first, I tried to joke with a nurse that the hospital was trying to get its blood back from the day before. Yeah, it wasn’t funny. Dr. Sandhu was throwing the book at my problems but with total focus.

During my stay, the various nurses were superbly efficient in following up on my complaints. It did not take long for me to realize that the Frankford Torresdale nurses are well educated and highly trained to perform under constant daily pressures. I was asked for my name and date of birth 1,643 times during the week. The checks on my identity probably could have been reduced to 1,521, but each caregiver is carecarecareful, and I am grateful they are such.

After the blood transfusions, an antibiotic (Levofloxacin) was administered daily via IV. This was to attack the UTI. Do I seem to be picking up the medical lingo??? They also ran a fluid IV at almost every available time period. Saline? Electrolytes? Looked like water.

Pain during urination and frequency and urgency continued throughout the week, but Doctor Sandhu et al attacked my problems. Through the blood tests, it was learned that maladies discovered by my family doctor became re-exposed in the hospital. A “mass” on my adrenal gland. A “nodule” on my liver. My family doctor also was concerned about my kidneys.

Monday night, still in the hospital, I encountered pain between near midnight and 3:00 a.m. Tuesday that exceeded all that I had endured since early June. If there was a chance of depression creeping in, it had to be early Tuesday. But it could be boiled down to the other activities involving me. There were times when the medications could not be administered when they would do their best. On Monday, I had a CatScan on my adrenal gland.

Late Monday night, I asked the nurse, Jaime, to give me medication for the pain. A bit later, she asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, how bad was the pain. During the six-week period, including pre-hospital, I often had answered 9 or 10. It had been that way for 10 or 15 seconds. Early Tuesday, my reply was “11″. It was the worst pain of all.

Within two hours, Jaime had me on the way to being pain free, at least until the next recurrence.

What I have come to discover is that each medication designed to handle the pain during urination, the urgency and the frequency must be administered at the right hour to be effective. And I suppose it is impossible for both nurse and patient to be forecasters who are timely and right every time.

And there are the interruptions, such as the CatScan. On Tuesday, I was given an MRI to look at my liver. That was the test that showed the “nodule”. Yesterday (Wednesday), I had a followup on the liver: a biopsy. Results to be available shortly.

Dr. Sandhu is comprehensive, thorough. He may be terse, but he is reporting the medical facts to scores of patients daily at Frankford Torresdale, he is getting alot done in a short time and he clearly is an asset to the hospital. You see such doctors on TV drama shows; I got to watch a “show” with even better examples of the service of the medical profession. They involved me! And I repeat: just about all of my up-close experiences with doctors this year have been favorable and impressive.

A hospital is a powerful place. What goes on there impresses me far more than the rich oak walls amidst the book cases and legal cases in a law firm. I guess some lawyers save people’s lives, in a matter of speaking. The people at a hospital save people’s lives, period.

In listing and thanking some of the people who worked so hard for me this past week, it always is a possibility that I will overlook someone, such as those two male nurses in the ER, and the doctor who explained at length what the blood transfusions would be, and why I had to have them. I don’t know the names of the men who pushed me around in my bed or wheelchair, or the fellow who pushed my wheelchair to the ER entrance last night so I could go home. I don’t remember the names of technicians in radiology. They have to be super efficient and accurate all day long. They were terrific.

And then, how about the nurses? They are so smart. Each patient has an RN (Registered Nurse) and a Nurse’s Aide. The nurses and their aides must be mini-lawyers in their own right, and investigative reporters. There was Rachael (yes, that’s the way it’s spelled) who took my blood pressure, my diabetic blood count, my temperature and my pulse rate. And the RN’s did the same things from time to time.

One day, my IV “line” had to be changed (after four days with the first line). My nurse on duty tried to find a vein twice. Tracey knows how to do it, but some days a patient’s blood lines go to Upper Darby. Or maybe I don’t have any veins??? Tracey sought help from Jess, Nurse Number Two, who tried an additional three times without success. I was a bit confused on her identity but I think “Lidia” was the third nurse to try. The third time’s a charm. Lidia found the lifeline. She should be a contestant on one of those TV shows where they ask for a lifeline. The “line” was used yesterday as part of the liver biopsy.

What I say about Rachael can be said about Terry, or Kim….and so on. Let me try to acknowledge professionals such as Lisa, Sheena, I mentioned Mari Pat (who seemed to have the Merck Manual in her brain, who told me plenty about a UTI), there was Tracey who was my RN three days’ straight, also Lidia (as noted above, I think she was third time’s a charm), Theresa Fitz who was my first night nurse, Alex, Janet, Jaime, and when they moved me out of Telemetry there were Peter and Nadia, and yesterday there was Maureen during the day and Jennifer after 3 p.m. Jennifer put up with me enough to arrange for my release from the hospital about 8:30 last night. And Jill. Nurse’s Aide. She is on the verge of passing the tests to be an RN. She worked 16 hours yesterday. She was a prime example of all of them who had to try to endure the urination spots I distributed all over the floor and in the bathroom. And all over my body. And on the bed sheets.

Both in the hospital and at home, my nights were continually disrupted by the problems noted above. I don’t know why but I seemed to pass the idle times overnight in idle singing of songs (just in my head). So, get a load of this for craziness: “Pop Goes The Weasel”, “Don’t Fence Me In”, “One” (from “A Chorus Line” LOL), “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”, here’s one for your real oldies: “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” !!! Yes, I know: Bizarre !! And how about going to the Brown’s Hotel on the “Atcheson, Topeka and Sante Fe” (“all the way from Philadel-FIGH-A”) and the last one I can remember: “Three Blind Mice”. Amateur psychiatrists, have your field day on this!!!

Speaking of those almost hourly hospital messes, as I was above, there was Janet Deshields (I think that is her name), one of the three housekeepers who had to find the special solution that cleaned up the orange urine, orange due to the medication I was taking. One day, I half-joked a question to Janet: “How does it feel to have the toughest job in the entire hospital?”

What she was going through reminded me of one of the toughest jobs involved with my business: cleaning buses. It can be a demeaning job, disgusting, etc. You know what I mean. To make a bus presentable for the next trip, after the last group unfortunately had practically ruined its interior, the bus cleaner had to dig in with all the methods of trash cleaning. The hospital housekeeper has a daily similar challenge. In fact, Janet faces more trash in the course of a week than a bus cleaner.

After I asked the question, she replied, with a sort of “Thank you”, so to speak, “Nobody’s ever said that to me before!”

She takes pride in her work.

Janet is a hard hospital worker. A hospital is a building we treasure far more than a law office. (I should make clear that those in law offices spend not a small amount of time making life miserable for many in the medical profession. Some cases have justification; many are the result of ambulance chasing.)

Twelve hours after my arrival home from the hospital last night, I was back on the radiation table this morning. And Treatment Number 36 is coming up tomorrow.

And, oh yes, I have to check on that biopsy report, too.

______________________________________________________________________________

The next morning, Friday, July 27th, I was feeling dizzy one hour after wake-up. I headed for the Oncology treatment, and was given Number 36.

My blood pressure was 108 over 48. It was going lower again. The woman oncologist suggested that I contact my primary physician so he knows what is happening. I went to the Family Physician office and signed in (I had no appointment). Through a receptionist’s error, I had to wait more than an hour, but I sat in the waiting room allowing the dizziness to ebb.

My doctor listened to my story, and told me he had just spoken with Dr. Sandhu at Frankford Torresdale. My doctor said I needed to go right back to the ER there.

I was taken to Room 16 quickly and an IV was running shortly thereafter. I needed once again to be hydrated. During the afternoon, I also was taken for another chest X-ray of my lungs and heart. This is a good hospital.

After a five-hour stay, the ER doctor, Amy Witkin, told me I had to drink more fluids if I am to avoid the intense pain during urination. Yeah, I know that. I was avoiding the fluids to avoid the pain. But I was on a trip to nowhere good. If I don’t force the fluids, the dehydration and light-headedness return.

Dr. Witkin, who said she once worked at (the now-closed) Graduate Hospital in downtown Philadelphia, gave me a discharge sheet that summed up my situation. It noted that 55% of the human body is water. Here is some of the commentary:

The average healthy adult consumes about two quarts of water a day in the form of milk, juice, soda, etc. Each day, about one quart of water is lost in the urine. About one quart is lost through evaporation. If, for some reason, the amount of water consumed is less than the water lost, the total amount of water in the body will decrease.

This is called dehydration.

It can result from any disease that produces nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or simply a decreased appetite.

It concludes: Diseases that frequently result in dehydration include the common cold, the stomach flu, pneumonia and urinary tract infections.

HOLY BATMAN!! It almost sounded as though the ER doctor had read the above commentaries on this blog! Just kidding, of course. But I was reading about myself.

The statement from Frankford Torresdale also said the most common symptoms of dehydration are a “run down” feeling, a dry mouth, decreased urination and a dizzy feeling when standing up.

What are the risks? the statement asked. Dehydration usually gets better over one to two days and does not ordinarily produce any serious medical problems. There are, however, some risks: Very severe dehydration can damage the kidneys or produce a serious chemical imbalance in the blood, and occasionally dehydration is the result of a serious medical problem such as diabetes or blood poisoning.

The INSTRUCTIONS include the advisory that “as long as you do not have any heart or kidney disease, you should DRINK LOTS OF FLUIDS. Adults should drink at least two to three quarts a day. Avoid diet soda or caffeinated drinks such as coffee, tea or colas”.

The hospital statement also described at length all about dizziness.

The hospital says some of the more common causes include anxiety, hyperventilation, dehydration and minor viral infections. Then, some of the more SERIOUS causes of dizziness include severe dehydration, serious infections, stroke, irregular heart beats, blood clots in the lungs, dangerously low blood pressure or even a heart attack.

Sometimes, the hospital reports, careful examination reveals the cause of the dizziness, but often it does not. In a private office or emergency department, it may not be possible to find the exact cause of a particular episode of dizziness. As for symptoms, there also may be a false sense of motion, as if the room were spinning in circles. This is called “vertigo”, which could mean a loss of balance and occasionally nausea and/or vomiting.

Most cases of dizziness, says the hospital, get better within a few hours and cause no serious medical problems. However, there always is a small chance the dizziness may be an early sign of a potentially serious medical problem, such as a serious infection, blood clots or even a heart attack. Serious problems are more likely to occur in people who have had previous heart or lung problems, smoke, have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes, or are persons more than 50 years of age.

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An update on a Sunday afternoon in mid-August August 19, 2007 . . . . . . . . . .

The weekend of July 28-29 was unpleasant. There was more of the same: urgencies, then intense pain and often then: a trickle. Nausea. Dizziness. I had two instances of the dry heaves at home that Sunday. Nonetheless, I went in for Treatment Number 37. I know I wasn’t their favorite patient; I was arriving at the Oncology building daily without enthusiasm, even though it was refreshing to see Heidi give me a warm “Good Morning”. During this visit, I threw up in the doctor’s office (the exam room) and on another occasion. You want to know what happened, don’t you, or you wouldn’t have read this far.

Admittedly, it was very discouraging because I had spent a week in the hospital, had been treated for a urinary tract infection and still was feeling the same pain as ever. I didn’t know it that Monday, but some relief, ironically, was a day away, but in bizarre fashion.

During the day Monday, however, I had two more instances of throwing up.

Around midnight Monday (going into Tuesday, July 31), I started getting even more frequent pain, if that were possible. It was worse than any time in the prior two months. There simply was no letup despite my quick pacing in the bedroom.

At 2:00 a.m. I HAD to go to the ER. My wife drove me.

Even though the ER had only two other patients, and I was interviewed by the intake nurse almost immediately, I could not get into an ER bed for nearly two hours, during which the pain had eased.

One of the nurses was Linda, my friend from my first visit July 18th.

One of the doctors concluded the situation called for a catheter. I had had one for a short while after my October, 2004, heart attack, but I could not recall much about that experience. At 7:00 a.m. Tuesday, the catheter was inserted (you know where) and I was discharged from the ER at 7:45 a.m.

But after arriving home, the greater pain returned, and things seemed to be just as they were after midnight prior to the trip to the ER. Agony was thy name. We called the ER because we didn’t know what to do, and were told to either come back to the ER or see my family doctor.

Shortly thereafter, the catheter was getting bloody. We called 911. And the ambulance from the Philadelphia Fire Department “911″ arrived in six or seven minutes and took me back to the ER.

After further examination, I was given pain medication and advised that the catheter, in fact, was my best course to be able to urinate with less discomfort. And actually, that was true. It apparently was that the combination of further pain and blood scared me to Upper Darby.

At times during that second ER visit that day, I could not believe how bad the pain could get right there in the hospital!!!

In late morning, I asked a doctor (nice fellow) if it would be possible to find out about the biopsy report. I said it was supposed to be ready on Friday (July 27) and now it was four days after that. The doctor returned in a half-hour to say that the report was not finished and I could find out the results, when available, by contacting my family doctor.

I was discharged from the ER for the second time that day about 2:20 p.m. The conclusion: the catheter was properly in place, and it would ease the flow during urination, and eliminate the need for frantic dashes to the bathroom, only (often) arriving there 10 seconds too late.

It was decided to postpone radiation treatments until the next week. As it happened, I had three more, ending Wednesday, August 8th. The pain was too much to proceed further. My urologist had given me his home telephone number, which I called that Wednesday night. He agreed the treatments should be stopped at 40. Even after that, of course, I expected no sudden cure.

I continued to pace and pace to walk off the periodic pain. The catheter definitely reduced the times, so despite that call to 911, it proved to be an improvement. But it wasn’t taking care of all the instances. And amongst the new difficulties came the return of diarrhea.

I had an appointment Thursday (August 2) with my family doctor, one arranged in connection with the hospital discharge Wednesday, July 25. I told my doctor what had been going on, etc., and also mentioned, perhaps too casually, that I still did not have the biopsy results from eight days before. My doctor immediately left the exam room and called Frankford Torresdale. He returned and said he had just spoken with the radiologist who had been working on the liver biopsy. The “report” was not yet in written form but it was in shape to be conclusive.

There were cancer cells in my liver …. is how my family doctor advised me: I have liver cancer.

He arranged an appointment with the surgeon at Frankford Torresdale for 1:15 p.m. the next Tuesday (August 7).

(Dr.) Jeffrey Brodsky, M. D. Frankford Hospital-Torresdale Medical Office Building Suite 235 3998 Red Lion Road Philadelphia, PA 19114 phone 215-612-5630 fax 215-632-3544. Surgical Oncology General Surgery Laparosscopic Surgery. Frankford Hospitals Jefferson Health System (he also has an office in Langhorne, PA)

At that office visit, the surgeon explained what was ahead. He would need to remove 4.1 centimeters of a cancer mass from the smaller lobe of my liver.

I am to report to the hospital at 6 a.m. tomorrow (meaning Monday, August 20). The operation is expected to take two to three hours, I may need a blood transfusion in the midst of it and I likely will be hospitalized three to five days.

I haven’t seen a day since early June when I wasn’t pacing back and forth, seeking to ease the pain.

Dr. Brodsky, my life is in your hands.

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After the surgery, I was not in shape to update this summary for a month, either due to further hospitalization or time at home when I was too weak to think about typing on the computer. So ………………………………………..

It is now 31 days after the operation. Tomorrow will be Thursday, September 20th. To recap: it was on the 20th, in August, that I arrived at Frankford Torresdale Hospital at 5:45 a.m. I was due there at the Admissions Department at 6:00 a.m.

The operation, after appropriate check-ins, started shortly after 8:30 a.m., if I remember what the anesthetist told me. In a seeming moment, I was back awake, with somebody knowing I was returning to consciousness: “It’s all over.”

From what I could glean, the operation extended into mid-afternoon.

They say some surgeons are cocky and repulsive in their behavior in the medical field. I suspect, however, all of them are messengers from God. Putting an incision across my belly about 10 inches somehow has to include the deity; a miracle. My stomach resembles a sketch of a mountain, with a tall television antenna at the top.

This was because of one of His miracle workers, Dr. Brodsky. No cocky one, he. All business except that he’s also a big sports fan, as am I.

Thank God for Dr. Brodsky; a cancer mass measuring 4.1 centimeters was removed in the lengthy procedure.

Nearly all my contact with hospital professionals was favorable.

I reported above on the nurses. I regret to say there was a negative day involving a nurse. For this description, call her “Kathleen”. It was the day (Tuesday, August 21) after surgery. The time was seven minutes to 9:00 a.m. I felt a strange pressure in my nose. I pressed the call button, and a nurse who was in training, working with Kathleen, came into my room. She realized she needed to call Kathleen.

Kathleen said a tube in my nose had backed up. She said she would have to call a doctor. It turned out, unknown to me, that a nasogastric intubation tube had been inserted in my nose. It extended into my stomach where it was to perform a draining function. However, it had retracted and formed a coil in my nose. Kathleen casually told me she would have to contact the doctor on duty.

Fifteen minutes later, and the pressure in my nose remaining, I pressed the call button. When Kathleen entered the room, she told me she had not yet reached the doctor, but the main problem of the moment, as far as she was concerned, was that I should be prepared for a trip to Radiology. I needed another chest X-ray.

I told her the chest X-ray could wait; first I had to get the nose pain eased. She was not convincing as she discussed her attempts to reach the doctor. She had explained that, as nurse, she was not able to deal with the faulty tubing. I asked her several times whether she had talked with the doctor. Once, finally, she told me she had been unable to reach him, as all physicians were in the surgery rooms. I asked if the hospital had a fallback position when a problem develops, and there seemingly is no doctor to consult. I have to tell you, as I think about it weeks later, that my greatest concern was the rather casual way Kathleen felt she could deal with the problem. I had to insist that she do something, and more than a half-hour after the tubing retracted into my nose, a woman intern came in and withdrew the coiling.

Because I was not even 24 hours out of surgery, everything that I was feeling seemed to be a bother and an uncertainty, an unknown. It had me in fear, especially because Kathleen was more interested in scheduling my X-ray than in easing my pain.

What the intern was able to do alleviated the problem but I lay there for more than three hours before a doctor (“Chris”) showed up about one o’clock, with Kathleen. Chris reinserted the nasal tube while Kathleen’s nurse-in-training gave me water to drink, and orders to swallow. I tried to get Chris to stop the process momentarily as I could handle the swallowing alot better with cold water than warm water. He seemed unconcerned that cold water would have speeded the process, which he finally completed, I am happy to say. The nasogastric tube ultimately was back in place, ready to perform its function.

I suppose I was more bothered by the day’s events due to the apparent lack of a little Hippocrates on the part of both Kathleen and Chris. As I look back on it, it seems to me all they would have had to do was EXPLAIN what the hell was going on, and what they were doing and what they had to do.

I didn’t have a clue. They should have informed me.

Since surgery day, Monday, August 20th, I continued to face a battle. I was discharged from the hospital on the eighth day (Monday, August 27th). But I knew I wasn’t a well person. Four days later, I was back in the hospital for a four-day stay. This was on the afternoon when my surgery “staples” were removed (31 of them !). In Dr. Brodsky’s office, I was again dizzy and exhausted, and Dr. Brodsky’s office quickly arranged for my re-admission. During the four days, the hospital concluded I once more was hit with a urinary tract infection. When I was discharged this time, I was of the same mind as my situation a week after liver cancer surgery. I walked out of the hospital partly based on hope.

So, as mentioned above, I was discharged on Labor Day, September 3.

The next week at home was frustrating. I still had the catheter and I still had the periodic pacings to ease pain, especially in the midst of normal sleep time. What was happening, I believe, is that I was avoiding the hospital/doctor/nurse entreaties to drink plenty of fluids because the more I drank, the more urination pain I encountered.

I was scheduled to have the catheter removed on Friday, September 7th, in Dr. Handler’s office. I showed up that day dizzy and still feeling sickly, and Dr. Handler told me he could not remove the catheter when I was still in sorry shape. So I went home with the catheter that day, Day Number 39 with it.

On Wednesday, September 12, my family doctor phoned to say that the most recent blood tests had revealed more kidney problems. Or to put it bluntly, as Dr. Miller did that morning, “Your kidneys have just about shut down.” He said I had no choice except to return to the hospital for further treatment. This was done in concert with Kidney and Hypertension Associates: One Woodhaven Mall (Andalusia ??? PA). Main office: Suite 152 825 Town Center Drive Langhorne, PA 19047 phone 215-741-3510 fax 215-741-3517.

A nephrologist by the name of Dr. Michael D. Shulman, M.D., visited me several times during my hospital stay.

During this period, I was facing an eight-day stay. Toward the weekend, it appeared I might be able to be discharged, although I know I had little strength and not much enthusiasm for anything, including the Phillies and Eagles. An associate of Dr. Handler’s, that Friday (September 14th), Dr. Coll, told me he felt the catheter had run its course; it was time to remove it. It was scheduled for Tuesday, September 18th. I must admit I was scared because I wondered if I would go back to the intense pain during the frequent urinations.

The weekend, however, turned things momentarily upside down. Saturday morning, the catheter bag showed red fluid. Blood. Blood in the urine. No doctor or nurse could provide a good guess as to what had happened to me between Friday night and Saturday morning. Blood in the urine. The red fluid continued throughout the weekend. I was scared.

On Monday morning, the bag was virtually clear. No blood in the urine. What happened? I happily asked. But no doctor or nurse had an answer. The only conclusion: be happy that the urine is clear again.

A hospital mystery, left virtually unsolved. And the plan to remove the catheter was still “on” for the next day.

And, removing the catheter (at 6:05 a.m. that Tuesday morning !!!) was a positive step. My body had to start working on its own, and did so. Although the first 24 hours were scary, I realized I had to keep at it, and lo and behold, the hospital doctor agreed to discharge me the next day, Wednesday.

Recovery was surprisingly and refreshingly rapid. I did have a hard time trying to eat the lunch that day. But within an hour, I was being discharged from the hospital, and I was feeling strengthened and wondering whether it was a cruel hoax being played on me.

At 2 p.m., I was heading out the front door of the hospital.

As I had vowed to myself to do, shortly after arriving home, I was in the backyard pitching to Kevin, my three-year-old great grandson. It had been more than three months since we last played together back there. In short order, Kevin smashed one of my pitches to beyond the doghouse and hollered “HOME RUN”. It was. Bases were loaded. Grand slam.

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During the three weeks since my last hospital stay, I was visited at home by a Visiting Nurse, first Kathy and then Heather. They also are experts in the field, and are able to give you extensive answers to your questions. I was fascinated by their knowledge. A Visiting Nurse definitely is an asset as part of the hospital discharge procedure.

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And now, on the second day of October, more than four months after I started the radiation, I have had two weeks of increasing recovery. I have my voice back, I am drinking the fluids and day by day my appetite is increasing. I am having three meals a day. I had worked from home during the last two weeks of September, and yesterday and today, I went into the office for a few hours.

I had a follow-up appointment with Dr. Brodsky this afternoon. Where liver cancer is concerned, nothing is for certain. He said he was able to remove all of the cancer August 20th, but there are no surgery guarantees. He wants to check me again the first week of January. My situation will continue to require watching.

Thank you for traveling these hectic weeks and months with me.

A SAD POST SCRIPT: There was reference in the above account to Gary Papa, sports director of 6ABC Philadelphia (Channel 6 in Philadelphia, formerly WPVI). Mr. Papa died of prostate cancer Friday, June 19, 2009. He had battled the cancer for nearly six years. He was 54. His last day on the air was May 13th.

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Middle School Career Day May, 2007

Ennis Manns, Principal of the Edwn H. Vare Middle School, Philadelphia, PA … asked me to talk to some of his seventh, eighth and ninth grade (middle school) students Thursday, May 10, 2007. It was Career Day at Vare. Allow me a bit of humor in the following remarks when I refer to the school as Ennis Manns Middle School.

Here is what I said to the young people of Vare Middle School:

Thursday, May 10, 2007
Edwin H. Vare Middle School
24th Street and Snyder Avenue
Philadelphia, PA

Last September, most…. if not all of you ……….. made a decision. You decided you should go back to school. You might have thought ……….. “I have to go back to school.” ………………. (You might not have been happy about it. Or you MIGHT HAVE BEEN.) ………….. The situation this morning is….. YOU’RE STILL HERE.

And whether you LIKE SCHOOL or don’t like school…. down deep…. inside… when you think about it…. you most likely realize: YOU BELONG IN SCHOOL.

Is school tough? Yes. Sometimes. If you wish to excel in life, you must confront school head-on. It is a grind. School was a grind when I attended. It is a grind today. School always has been a grind.

You NEED to go to school. And…. you need to STAY IN SCHOOL.

So it is a pleasure to be with you this morning at Ennis Manns Middle School!

Now, as part of Career Day here at Ennis Manns Middle School, I will tell you about myself. You will hear that I have had three jobs in my life (three “careers”), each fun….and rewarding. What you may find surprising is that ……..at AGE 73…. I am still working and also launching my fourth career. I don’t HAVE to work… but it’s just continued to work out that way.

(Don’t think that you may have to work until you’re 73…but also know… if you do …. it will be because you LIKE the job.)

However, while I will talk about myself, I first need to talk about YOU.

YOU ….. as an INDIVIDUAL. One person in this classroom.

YOU are the important consideration today. And YOU are the one who needs to make an important decision today . . . . . . even though you don’t have to DO ANYTHING about it right today.

I want to show you the photograph of a little boy. His name is Kevin Pierron.
(Photo)

He is my GREAT GRANDSON. He is a very nice boy.

He lives with me. Yes, he lives in my home in Philadelphia.

His lives with me….because his Daddy…. my grandson…. decided when he was in the ninth grade…. that he didn’t like school. Not only did he not like school…. he started SKIPPING SCHOOL. He started neglecting his homework. He fell behind. He got disgusted about himself. And about life.

And then……….. SURPRISE !!! He quit school.

In the ninth grade.

Over the next few years, my grandson tried to learn about computers ………………… how they work and …………. how you can put a series of them into a network. And he has made some progress. But he is still looking for his first good job. And he has to continue to look ……… and look…. because employers at all levels of work are seeking EDUCATED job candidates. Whatever it is you do, you need to do … and be …… YOUR BEST. You need to be educated.

DO YOUR BEST at WHATEVER JOB you get.

So, about my grandson ……. In the midst of this period after he quit school, he had a girl friend. And nearly three years ago, they became the parents of Kevin.

Neither my grandson nor his girlfriend was able to SUPPORT Kevin. It takes MONEY. They were teenagers who thought everything would just be so easy, so “duckey”, and they would have so much fun being parents. ………….. (They would not listen to others who told them how important it is to get a good education. And to finish school.)

No, it just didn’t turn out so easy. It doesn’t turn out that way.

If you quit on your education, and become a Mommy or a Daddy at a young age, you are suddenly trying to lift a TRAIN LOCOMOTIVE to get through life. It doesn’t matter how strong you think you are: you cannot lift a train locomotive.
My grandson was trying to do that.

And then he and his girlfriend broke up . . . . . . after they had pledged themselves to each other ……….. FOREVER. ……… They no longer are a couple. ………. They had no means and no money to take care of Kevin.

This happens all over Philadelphia. All over America. All over the world.

WHY? It is relatively SIMPLE. Mommy and Daddy thought it would be DIFFERENT in their case. They could DO IT…….IT WOULD BE SO WONDERFUL to be parents….. to have a child. They knew more about it than the older folks in their families.

Teenage Mommies and Daddies (such as has been Kevin’s parental situation) ……. are going to fumble every single time.

Not almost always. Every single time.

And what did my grandson and his girlfriend do ???

Well, the question REALLY is: WHAT DIDN’T THEY DO ???

They did NOT STAY IN SCHOOL.

So, now, at age 73, I ………. Kevin’s GREAT GRANDFATHER…. am the one who plays basketball, and baseball, and football and golf …. with Kevin.

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When he was a young teenager, I tried to tell my grandson how important it was to go to school. I told him how I had made up my mind….at a very young age….that I was going to try to get the best grades. I told him how I NEVER cut a class……. I NEVER skipped school. Some of my classmates over the years thought cutting classes and skipping school was COOL.

I just did not agree. What I said (to my grandson) went in one ear and out the other. Ask yourself: is that happening to you this morning? You are listening to me with deaf ears?

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Before I finished college, I got a job…. at age 19…. at a small radio station in Missouri. In four years, I was the station’s manager.

During that period, I was graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. The school was the FIRST JOURNALISM school in the nation…. it was started 99 years ago.

It was a terrific school. And I got high grades. Unlike some of the other students, you wouldn’t find me drinking beer at two o’clock in the morning. And I never cut a class in college, either.

After graduation, I went to a radio and television station in Des Moines (????? what state ?????)….and after five years, my work there led to my move to Philadelphia. Channel 3 and what eventually became “Eyewitness News” ….. where I worked eight years. I was a street reporter ….. newscaster …….. investigative reporter.

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I had great teachers…. both in college …. and in radio and television.

I learned how important it is to speak well…. to speak clearly. And I learned the tricks of speech. For example, I was taught not to say the word PARTICIPATE; instead, TAKE PART.

I was taught not to try to say PAR TIC U LAR LY.

It is much easier to say ESPECIALLY.

I was taught the difference between the word LIE and the word LAY. You lay a book on a table. You LIE DOWN AND REST. It has been my experience that perhaps 90% of the doctors and nurses I have met…. have asked me to LAY down….. so they could examine me.

I am a public annoyance, frankly. I usually tell the nurses and doctors that they have used the wrong word. They should have asked me to LIE DOWN.

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I was taught the difference between FARTHER and FURTHER.

To win the NFL’s Punt, Pass and Kick Contest, you have to throw the football FARTHER than anybody else.

If you want to know more about the football contest, you can look into the matter FURTHER.

Said simply: FARTHER means distance; FURTHER means EXTENT.

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When you answer the phone, do you, as a boy, when somebody asks for you….. do you say “This is him” ………. or …. if you are a girl…. do you say “This is her”. To be grammatically correct….you say: “This is he” or “This is she”.

And what about the difference between “I” and “me”? You boys who watch football on TV might have heard John Madden describe a pass: “The quarterback threw that right between he and the defender.” (The “he” in the sentence referred to, most likely, is a receiver on the quarterback’s team.)

John Madden is wrong every time he says it. He should say “between the defender and him.”

How do you know what is correct? (STAY IN SCHOOL…and you’ll find out.)

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I was taught proper grammar. And spelling. I was taught so well that I now know how badly many of today’s speakers SPEAK, especially those on the air….on your TV screen. And too often, I see where television people behind the scenes do not know how to spell.

And they don’t know their history…… the history of this country, and the history of the world. This is very important to be able to handle all kinds of life issues as you become an adult.

It is so important that you learn how to speak. And how to spell. Your ability to speak well….. and to spell words…. demonstrates not only for others….. but for YOURSELF….. that it is SO IMPORTANT TO BE EDUCATED.

TO BE EDUCATED….. YOU MUST STAY IN SCHOOL.

You must pay attention to your teachers. Get to school on time. Attend all your classes. Attend school every day the school is open for you.

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I was very busy during my 18 years in broadcasting. Perhaps my most significant TV work here in Philadelphia came more than 40 years ago… during one two-month period. I appeared three times on the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC. In those days, the newscast was watched by 36-million people, so that’s a big audience to speak to.

(Ironically, there were more viewers for that newscast than …. today …. for ALL of the viewers for NBC, CBS and ABC combined for their 6:30 national newscasts …..).

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A reporter experiences a thousand stories, a thousand incidents. I once attended a news conference with former President Harry Truman.

I shook hands with former President Dwight Eisenhower on his 73rd birthday and (for NBC) I covered the speech he made that night.

I was assigned by Channel 3 to President John Kennedy’s Philadelphia appearance just one month before Dallas.

In 1964 …….. yes….. this was 43 years ago!!!! ………… I interviewed Richard Nixon, then the former Vice President, a year after he lost the 1962 race for Governor of California.

And in 1975, after I had left Channel 3, for the only time in my life, I shook hands with a sitting President, Gerald Ford, who died four months ago at the age of 93.

My work at Channel 3 led to an invitation from the incoming Mayor of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, to be the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Civic Center. At the Civic Center, I was the boss of 200 employees. I was in that job for eight years …. all the time Frank Rizzo was Mayor.

That was a great job. Being the boss of 200 employees is not unlike being the boss of 20 or 2,000. You must have leadership qualities. You must be able to “lead” people ….. to manage them…….. to direct them. If you cannot do it, your shortcomings will reveal themselves quickly. You won’t stay in the job very long.

At the end of the two terms of Mayor Rizzo, I helped to start a business that is still operating 27 years later. Included in this operation is a travel agency which also conducts day trip and overnight tours. During those 27 years, we acquired five motorcoaches. We had to hire travel agents for the travel agency, drivers for the motorcoaches.

I’ll tell you a little secret. Don’t let this get around. One of our travel agents was a young fellow by the name of Ennis Manns.

Your Principal. This was before he became famous.

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Whether at the Civic Center or at the travel agency, the challenges are the same: you must lead, you must perform, you must be ready at all times to handle problems and emergencies. You must be able to “think” on the spot and act accordingly.

Only experience in life …………. and a proper education….. will enable you to make the correct decisions.

And yes, the way you speak…and the way you WRITE …. in your job ….. and in your life ……… is critical to your success. Whether you are one of the employees….or the boss…. you must be able to present yourself effectively. Said another way: YOU HAVE TO BE “ON THE BALL”.

You can demonstrate “leadership qualities” even if you are not the boss. The boss is looking for people who can produce work, who are reliable …. who are intelligent …. who show up for work on time….. do not call in sick every time they get a sniffle …. and who are on the ball….. and who are “educated”.

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Let me speak for just a moment about “MISTAKES”.

When you do not get an “A” grade, implicit is the likelihood that you were not perfect; you made a mistake or two in completing your assignment. A “mistake” never should be so great a problem for you that you lose confidence in yourself. You try to do better…and work harder…. the next time.

Because “MISTAKES” are part of life. I see “mistakes” every day. Sad to say, many I see are due to a person’s lack of education. What I see clearly allows me to tell you: there is great opportunity for YOU after you complete school. So many employers are looking for EDUCATED employees. And I assure you…. once you have that nice job you want…. you can…. from time to time…. make mistakes.

(Just don’t make too many of them, and don’t make the same mistakes over and over.)

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I am sorry to have to tell you but some of you are not going to make it. It is not because you are stupid. But it IS BECAUSE you are not smart. You did not pay attention in school. You did not get to school on time. You missed homework assignments. You stayed up so late at night, you were too sleepy the next day to pay attention. You let your friends drag you down. You did not have the “guts” to tell your friends you had to get home and get to sleep…because you had school the next day. And school is more important than your friends.

Wait a minute: Did I just say that ? Yes you heard right. School is more important than your friends! And more important than TV shows.

Oh, please forgive me. I should not have said that! At your age now, there is no way you will agree with me: School is more important than your friends. But do me a favor and write that down. School is more important than your friends.
And then put the piece of paper you wrote that on….. someplace where you know where it is. Because…. 10 years from now… I want you to re-read the statement and see if you have a different opinion of my statement….than you do today.
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If you cannot dig it, you will fail. Failure never pays off. Failure becomes a statistic. Failure becomes a life sickness. Do you want to just become another of the thousands of statistics in Philadelphia?

Why do I say that some of you in this class won’t make it in life??? Because that’s what the percentages say. I hope you prove me wrong. ……….. The news is filled today… with losers. Guys and gals who could not dig it. Who did not show up on time. Who let their friends dictate their lives. Who showed up late or cut their classes in school.

The losers are weak. They are weak people. They did not grab their lives in their hands and decide to succeed.

Because y’see, success is easily within reach …. if you have a plan for your life. At your age right now, you can make that decision I told you about. You can decide to stay in school.

Yes, I know you won’t remember much of what’s being said here at the Ennis Manns Middle School Career Day. That is understandable and normal. (Your teachers may give you a quiz on what you heard today from the various speakers so pay attention to today’s speakers!)

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But you will make me very happy….. if you walk out of school today and remember ONE THING YOU HEARD FROM ME. It is so important; at your young age, it just may not be sinking in. But I hope so.

I hope you will show up every day …….. on time ….. And I hope you….get a great education and become a leader. The world is waiting for leaders. The world is waiting for YOU.

How do you do it ? Throughout MIDDLE school……….. HIGH school…. college……….. you stick with it. You do your homework. You don’t just dig it. You dig in.

You stay in school. Thank you for your kind attention. ####

The above remarks were made before four of the Vare Middle School classes. You might have seen a reference above to my “fourth” career. As an unexpected feature at the close of each talk, I looked to the hallway and welcomed into the classroom ONE MASTER KEVIN PIERRON. Each time, on cue, Kevin ran to my arms and said “Hi” to the school children (on one occasion, he was bashful and said nothing). I admit to considerable bias, but he was terrific.

Santa Claus and the Philadelphia Eagles

One of the legends of the Philadelphia Eagles football team was the day fans threw snowballs at Santa Claus. Its origin, however, has been roundly misreported. I have thought about this frequently, as the story recurs every year. At age 73, I think it is past time for me to clarify the errors attached to the legend. I had an accidental but not insignifant part in the origin.

So here goes.

It was Sunday, December 15, 1968. It was the last Eagles home game of a (for them) dismal season. I was working as substitute Sunday night newscaster for KYW-TV, Channel 3, Philadelphia. The well-known and highly popular weekend newscaster until that summer, Harry K. Smith, had retired and given me as his legacy a very high Sunday night audience. It was my job to handle the last four months or so of the year and not mess things up until a replacement for Harry was free of his contract in Atlanta.

The Eagles were not popular in our newsroom that year. The assignment editor, Bill Dean, would give me a 100-foot film can each Friday when the Eagles had a home game. Bill would instruct me: “Give this to (the film cameraman of the weekend) and tell him to just shoot the touchdowns.” Everybody would laugh. But the mission statement was clear: don’t waste film on the Eagles.

One can of film, 100 feet, was fewer than three minutes worth of run time. But we just needed a good 20 seconds for the 11 p.m. newscast. And not very much was expected of the Eagles that year. That was the final year of Joe Kuharich as coach. That summer, on the shore beaches, the small plane streamers had proclaimed “Joe Must Go.”

I do not remember the name of the cameraman. In those days, it was normal to hire a free-lancer for the weekends, which served low budget newscasts. The cameraman would work eight hours Saturday and eight hours Sunday, and you would hope there would be some news worth airing. It was silent film only; no sound. The cameraman probably was NOT Denny Bossone but I do not remember. I asked his son, Larry, another Channel 3 news cameraman, if his Dad ever had mentioned taking pictures of Santa Claus at an Eagles game. Larry said he could not recall, but that his Dad kept a library in his garage of discarded film, and the Santa Claus clips could have been there. However, he said the whole garage load of Denny Bossone film work subsequently was sold to a New York film company. And Larry added that he thought his Dad was full-time in 1968.

Some years later, I read a newspaper story that said thousands of feet of KYW-TV newsfilm had been given to Temple University. So is it there??

Anyhow, in the late afternoon that Sunday, I went to the editing room with the film editor to review the film shot that day. When it came to the Eagles 100 feet of film, we did a double-take. We saw Santa Claus walking down the track at Franklin Field waving energetically to the fans in the stands. He was a jolly old soul but could not have expected what he suddenly was confronting, made possible by the snowstorm the day before.

In those days, the film came in “negative” form; the reverse polarity occurred when the film was projected for the TV screen. This was film of yesteryear: black and white, not color. But the scene was unmistakable. Those were snowballs flying past Santa Claus.

There weren’t that many but Santa went into double trot and quickly finished his on-field season’s greetings. So much for the cheerful half-time show. By checking the rest of the film with the brief play action we had, we could tell this occurred at half-time. I don’t recall if the cameraman captured any touchdowns, but the Eagles lost.

In those days, the newscast at 11 p.m. ran a half-hour. I was alone in the newsroom all evening except for the copy boy, who would continually check the news wires. Sundays are slow news days generally; we relied on national and international news and the newsmaker from “Meet The Press”. We covered the complete weather in not more than two minutes on Sundays, unlike the obsesssion with the subject the rest of the week, continuing even to today.

When the NBC-TV show ended at 10:59 p.m., I came on and gave a few headlines as was routine, and ended with: “AND TODAY SOME EAGLES FANS THREW SNOWBALLS AT SANTA CLAUS. Details with film coming up next.”

When it came time for the sports news, I gave the Eagles story straight but then went to the snowballs film. I could tell from the reaction of the studio crew that this was a grabber. It was a rather bizarre incident, and when you saw Santa Claus vigorously waving and then being forced to duck, you had immediately sympathy for Old St. Nick.

The next day, at the station, especially in the newsroom, snowballs and Santa Claus were about the only discussion. Vince Leonard, the regular Number One newscaster, made sure the Santa film was re-run during the Monday evening casts. And later in the week, Jim Leaming, sportscaster, ran it twice as a rueful analysis of the Eagles sorry season.

I know it ran at least four times that week (after Sunday night). It was only maybe 20 seconds long so it was easy to repeat.

When you do an unusual news story, it is common to check other media to see how they handled it (if they did). We knew Monday that nobody but KYW-TV had film of the snowballs and Santa Claus. I was a bit puzzled to read only one mention of the incident in the Monday newspapers. Frank Dolson, Inquirer columnist, made reference to it in about the seventh paragraph of his sad treatise on the windup home game.

I really thought we had a bit of an odd scoop, especially with the film. I believe my fellow news people in the Channel 3 newsroom agreed, based on their replays of the yarn during the week. For the most part, the incident otherwise was viewed as a non-story.

I should point out that Harry K. Smith had a huge ratings advantage on his weekend newscasts, and for as much as we could compare, the ratings for the four months I did the newscast sustained their weekly lead. During the week, Channel 3 had a decided ratings lead in news. In the late 1960′s, before “Action News” at Channel 6 surpassed us in the early 1970′s, the City Hall reporter from Channel 6 would say: “We (Channel 6) clean the transmitter when you come on at six o’clock.” Regretfully, it did not continue that way for a period of years in the 1970′s. Action News became Number One in the ratings.

But this was long after a few Eagles fans threw snowballs at Santa Claus and thousands saw the whole “legacy” that night.